The Queen of Blood
The Queens of Renthia series, Book 1
Sarah Beth Durst
Harper Voyager
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: In the land of Renthia, natural spirits move the winds and grow the seeds and keep the waters flowing... and also bring hurricanes and twist the trees and raise floods and storms and worse. Without a strong queen to keep them in check, the spirits would rid the land of all humans and turn everything to chaos. But this is not a hereditary calling: any girl, from the lowest outlying villager to the highest courtier, who has an affinity for the spirits - able to sense them and bend them to their will - may be trained and potentially selected to serve as an heir, to step up when the current queen fades or falls.
Daeleina, a girl of rustic Graytree, never thought such a fate would be hers... until an attack of rogue spirits utterly destroys her village, and she alone manages to spare her family with a single, desperate command, telling them to stop.
From service to a lackluster hedgewitch to earning entrance into a prestigious academy at the capital, Daleina struggles to grow her gifts. She knows she's not strong enough to ever be an heir, but she'll never see another village destroyed as hers was if she can possibly help it. Perhaps, she thinks, she could aspire to be a guardswoman, or even perhaps a royal champion like the one who came to the remains of Graytree after its fall. But fate is a strange and sometimes terrible thing, and she finds herself drawn deeper into the world of spirits and the capital, and the machinations of an increasingly ruthless and desperate queen.
REVIEW: I've read a few titles by Durst, and have yet to be disappointed by her. This story, first in a series, establishes an interesting fantasy world of wild, unpredictable natural spirits forever torn between urges to create and destroy, and humans who find themselves forever pincered between needing the life they imbue to the land (without them, crops wouldn't grow and rivers wouldn't run and even fires won't spark) and knowing the spirits share a seemingly innate hatred of people. Daleina never intended to harbor aspirations to power, until the attack on her village - an attack that turns out to be less random than it first appeared - revealed her modest gifts. Unlike some stories, she never truly does become the strongest or the fastest or even necessarily the wisest after the obligatory training period and setbacks; others remain inherently better at summoning and controlling spirits. What she does have, from the start, is determination, if not to succeed - she never really does see herself as crown material - then to not fail. Her path has some sidetracks and setbacks, complicated by the queen's increasingly desperate desire to grasp for immortalizing glory beyond her fading skills that drive her to cross lines that cannot be uncrossed. Side characters have their own journeys and revelations, too, particularly the disgraced champion who takes a chance on training the middling academy student from the fringes of civilization. The plot moves fairly well, even if the rough sketch of it isn't vastly different from other tales of small-town girls making their way in a bigger and fantastic world, and it comes to a satisfactory conclusion that feels earned. I'll have to see if the next book is still available on Overdrive; this is a world I wouldn't mind revisiting at all.
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