Title: Three Dark Crowns
Author: Kendare Blake
Rating: 2/5 stars
Goodreads Summary: Three sisters. One crown. A fight to the death.
In every generation on the island of Fennbirn, a set of triplets is born: three queens, all equal heirs to the crown and each possessor of a coveted magic. Mirabella is a fierce elemental, able to spark hungry flames or vicious storms at the snap of her fingers. Katharine is a poisoner, one who can ingest the deadliest poisons without so much as a stomachache. Arsinoe, a naturalist, is said to have the ability to bloom the reddest rose and control the fiercest of lions.
But becoming the Queen Crowned isn't solely a matter of royal birth. Each sister has to fight for it. And it's not just a game of win or lose . . . it's life or death. The night the sisters turn sixteen, the battle begins.
The last queen standing gets the crown.
Review:
Let's just start by saying that I really wanted to love this book. I didn't go in with necessarily high expectations but I had this feeling like I was going to enjoy it. It seemed like a really promising premise that I was going to enjoy. Sadly, I was quite disappointed with it. While I really enjoyed some aspects, overall, it was a let down. In saying that, I think there's a lot of good set up for a much more satisfying sequel. So, I'll keep my fingers crossed for that.
So, why was it so disappointing? A good three quarters of this book just felt like a drag. It took me a little while to get a grasp of the setting ad characters, but once I did, it felt like nothing was happening with them. Fantasy narratives tend to start slower to give you time to get a handle on things, but the speed up into the good stuff. Not this book. It just trudged along for far too long and felt like we were constantly kept in the introductory portion of the book. Slow pace is not necessarily a bad thing, but I think for this story, it wasn't a favourable way of doing it. Once things began to get more intense and gripping in the last hundred or so pages, it just felt right. It felt like that was the story I had been hooping from this book all along.
I enjoyed the characters for the most part. Katherine felt like the dullest of the three sisters, but I'm not sure if that's because she is actually uninteresting, or the narrative favours the other two because more was happening with them. Either way, I felt little towards her as a character. Mirabella was my favourite of the sisters. She felt beautifully complex and I really loved the different regard she took towards her sisters, despite their situation. I'm not sure how I feel about that romance, though, but I think I'll give it until the sequel to really see how things pan out.
Okay, but my hopes for the sequel. First and foremost, I was under the impression that this book was a standalone for most the book. Perhaps this effected how I felt about the slow pacing, since I thought everything was going to need to be wrapped up in the singular novel. As I reached the last 20 or so pages, I definitely realised that this was going to have a sequel. I was really excited for a contained story but oh well. I think the last sections of the book were really good and set up some interesting things another book. So, while I wasn't huge on this one, I really do think the next one could be great. At least, we can hope.
Anyway, have any of you read this book? It's been getting a decent amount of hope in the online book community, and I'm interested in other people's opinions! Loved it and didn't mind the slow start? Or hated it was bored out of your mind? I wanted to keep this spoiler-free so I won't specifically say but how did we find the small twist at the end? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
Until next time!
- J, xxx
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