by Sarah Kozloff
Series: The Nine Realms #1
Published on January 21, 2020 by Tor
ISBN: 9781250168542
Format: Paperback
Pages: 477
Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Orphaned, exiled and hunted, Cérulia, Princess of Weirandale, must master the magic that is her birthright, become a ruthless guerilla fighter, and transform into the queen she is destined to be.
But to do it she must win the favor of the spirits who play in mortal affairs, assemble an unlikely group of rebels, and wrest the throne from a corrupt aristocracy whose rot has spread throughout her kingdom.
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The moment I read the synopsis for A Queen in Hiding I was sold. It sounded like everything I could ask of a fantasy novel with the added bonus of only having to wait a month for each book in the series to release.
But wow was it slow.
A Queen in Hiding starts strong and I was excited to watch Cerulia grow and learn and hold her own in this female-centric cast. In that regard I was reminded a bit of Mark Lawrence’s Red Sister which sees a young girl (Nona) grow up over the course of the trilogy. Here it just wasn’t working because the book lost Cerulia’s focus.
For a while, the perspectives bounced primarily between Cerulia and her mother Cressa, but later on we’re introduced to a much larger cast of characters that… well, I didn’t care about them, which made slogging through their scenes even slower than they needed to be.
I’ll hand it to Kozloff, though. It couldn’t have been easy to weave so many story lines together in a cohesive manner. The plot points hit, the characters were well-developed and multi-faceted. The world-building was the sort you could lose yourself in for hours on end.
But I was bored. In order to set up all this intricate world-building and ensure the characters were in place, you end up spending over half the book waiting. Cerulia, despite the synopsis indicating she’s the primary character in this story, is often absent from scenes and when she’s there I didn’t really care one way or the other (not promising for three more books about her adventures…).
The pacing was my predominant issue with A Queen in Hiding and makes me wonder why the series is being released so readers can tackle the stories back to back in such a short time-span (one book per month). This sort of story just doesn’t strike me as a good fit for that kind of reading but then again, I struggled with the whole book so that opinion is biased.
I’m disappointed I couldn’t get into A Queen in Hiding more. It seemed like such a great fit but just wasn’t for me.
About Austine
I'm a 20-something research proposal developer with a background in the life sciences and education. Reviewer of books since 2011, amateur photographer by day, and aspiring author by night. I believe animals (and books) are better than people.
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