Book Review: Queen of the Conquered
Reading more diverse books has been a goal of mine for the last several years, and on the whole, I’ve done a much better job of seeking out marginalized authors. But given the circumstances of 2020, I wanted to make a more targeted effort to seek out Black writers this year. One result of that was reading Queen of the Conquered.
When she was a child, Sigourney Rose’s family were murdered by the nobles of her island nation, unhappy to see a dark-skinned family who weren’t slaves to the white nobles. Sigourney survived, barely, and returned to the islands to inherit a noble position from a childless white relative. Now in a position of power once more, Sigourney is out for vengeance against the people who killed her family. Her goal: survive the storm season on the king’s island and convince the king to name her his heir.
I’m about to do something I don’t frequently do: review a book I didn’t like.
To be frank, I was really excited about this going in. The vengeance plot sounded exciting, the world seemed intriguing, and I was hoping for a great read. I started the book, and my expectations came to a crashing halt about 30 pages in as I got mired in one of the book’s two main problems.
What are those problems? Well, let’s enumerate:
Sigourney is not a hero, not even an anti-hero. She’s a villain. She has almost no redeeming qualities. She’s not a nice person, she doesn’t treat her own slaves well. She’s selfish and greedy for power, and she can find a way to justify anything to herself if it means getting what she wants. On top of that, she makes frustratingly poor decisions; she thinks she’s a lot smarter than she actually is. And worst, she doesn’t grow. At all. Since the book is written in 1st-person, this makes reading the book an uncomfortable experience. I don’t mind anti-heroes and villains as main characters though, so this by itself wouldn’t have been enough to put me off the book necessarily, except…
The author uses Sigourney’s mind-reading / mind control powers as a crutch to info-dump and “tell” instead of “show.” This, to my mind, is the single worst thing about the book. Entire chapters go off the rails as the author dumps backstory on us that Sigourney is “reading” out of somebody’s head. Dialogue, which is INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT for maintaining a novel’s pacing, absolutely vanishes off the page in favor of long, drawn out monologues about emotions and backstory of characters I don’t know and don’t care about. This information should be conveyed through dialogue, through actions, through story, but instead we just get a laundry list of it. It makes the book as slow as molasses, and I struggled hard to get through it. I nearly didn’t finish, and I haven’t DNFed a book in literal years.
There are other problems, other strange loopholes (why was Sigourney the only one who noticed that the king was dead / wasn’t real? Surely some of the other nobles with kraft would have realized?), but these are the worst offenders.
And it’s a shame, really, because there was so much potential here. The worldbuilding is excellent; you can tell that Callender is feeding real-life inspiration into the novel. The island nation of Hans Lollik and its dynamics with the kongelig nobles who invaded and stole it, who banned the islanders’ culture, is a interesting frame. I love the idea of kraft, a type of magic that varies from person to person, and Callender put together some interesting powers for the characters that have it.
And on the surface, the plot sounds interesting too. It’s a bit of a political Hunger Games, mixed with some ghosts and murder mystery elements. If it hadn’t been bogged down in so much boring monologue, it has excellent bones, and I was actually curious about what would happen at the end (which is the reason I pushed through to the conclusion).
It seems, based on my glance at the sequel, that the next book is not written from Sigourney’s POV, which might get rid of the problems that made this book a slog. But at this point, I’m not sure if I’m going to continue; it took me three weeks to read a roughly 400 page novel, for someone who can chug through a 400-page novel in a few hours (and regularly does so, and in fact did read all three of Jenn Lyons’ Chorus of Dragons books while reading this one).
Your mileage may vary, but I can’t in good conscience recommend this one.
Grade: 2/5 stars
Memorable Quote:
“I work my kraft and sink into her thoughts, as I came here to do. The Elskerinde lies. I can feel it in her bones. The woman despises me. She’s disgusted, greeting a woman with skin as dark as mine, when I should be working the fields. Elskerinde Jannik has only known slaves since she came to these islands of Hans Lollik. There are people with brown and black skin in the nations to the north, but the town they lived in within Koninkrijk was far from these empires; it was only when she got on the ship that would bring her to these islands that she saw people with skin as dark as mine for the first time. It was easy to believe the lies she was told: that people with dark skin are closer to animals than she, that the gods have marked our skin to show that we are evil and must be shown the ways of the good through obedience to the Fjern. She thinks of this now as she watches me entering her room, as though I’m her equal. I’m not obedient. I watch her in defiance with my dark skin.”
