The Reluctant Queen
The Queens of Renthia series, Book 2
Sarah Beth Durst
Harper Voyager
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Once, the girl Daleina was the least promising of the candidates training to be an heir of the crown of Aratay, leader of the people and their only defense against the malevolent nature spirits of the land. Now, after treachery and hardship and loss and much bloodshed, she is Queen... but maybe not for long. When she begins to show signs of a deadly disease known as the false death, she realizes that she does not have the luxury of waiting years for new candidates and heirs to be trained up and tested - especially not when Aratay's neighbors to the north, perhaps sensing the new queen's weakness, begin testing their borders. Daleina orders her royal Champions to find new candidates, girls and women with an affinity for the spirits. Many can be found in the capital's academies, young and untested... but there are others among the far-flung villages, working as local hedgewitches or even hiding their gifts, lest they draw unwanted attention from spirits and people alike.
Naelin saw her mother destroyed by spirits, and has vowed never to use her own powers except in direst need, to save her own children. She hasn't even told her husband of her abilities, which she sees as more curse than gift; he'd just try to find a way to use it to make his life easier and richer. But when he tricks her into revealing herself - endangering their young daughter and son in the process - it sets in motion a chain of events that will rip her from her cozy home and quiet life and plunge her into danger and intrigue and possible war.
REVIEW: I enjoyed the first book in this series, a fantasy with strong women and an interesting world with capricious spirits forever torn by their contradictory urges to create and destroy. I thought I'd enjoy following the series. But this installment has me wondering just how far I want to follow it.
The world remains intriguing, with returning and new characters further fleshing it out. Daleina has been forced past her insecurities, accepting her fate as the Queen, only to find herself facing a new challenge when the fainting spells of the false death threaten the country; when she's unconscious, the spirits break free of her will to wreak havok, often deadly havok, on the populace. Naelin is a very different kind of candidate, a grown woman with a husband and family... and here is where things started to grow shaky. She's a momma bear (to quote the oft-used phrase from the book), entirely devoted to her young children. She clings to them. She ruffles their hair and hugs them and indulges their antics (I expect I was supposed to find their mere existence endearing, given how much page time they devoured), and would happily let the rest of the nation and world burn if she could find a cozy little hole of a home to curl up in with them for eternity. Naelina repeatedly (and tiringly) denies any other priority or need. She is absolutely nothing beyond being a mother, wanting nothing but to be a mother, demanding to never be anything but a mother with little children to coddle. It's a slow but subtle theme that builds through the book, that anyone (particularly any woman) who wants anything other than a small picket-fence-equivalent life as house mother is unhappy, suspect, or otherwise self-deluded. Even Queen Daleina needs a momma bear to protect her, apparently... and she falls into yet another cycle of denial, even if not quite the same one that ate a little too much time in the previous volume, this time concerning an old rival whom she insists is still actually a friend despite all blatant evidence to the contrary. How many times must a person be stung before they realize it's not a butterfly they're holding but a hornet? Honestly, I found myself wishing someone in Renthia would invent baseball just so I could take a bat to the main characters' skulls as they rehashed the same stale and debunked denials. At some point, the story started feeling stretched, in no small part because people would not just sit down and shut up and accept the obvious to move the story forward. Nevertheless, things do build to a reasonably satisfying (if not entirely unexpected) conclusion, setting up the third (and presumed final) installment. I will probably want to see how the story ends eventually, but I'm a little less enthused to return than I was at the start of this volume.
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