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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Rating: 3.5/5
Pages: 368
Started: 3 March 2023
Finished: 5 March 2023
Summary:
Princess Thia was born to be a Crow Rider, to protect her Rhodesia from the back of a giant crow imbued with a formidable power of nature. Except a year prior, the warring nation of Illusia attacked, killing all the crows, murdering Thia's mother the Queen, and leaving Thia with a scrawl of burns scars up her hands.
Now Rhodesia is in ruins, and Thia spends her days struggling with PTSD and depression. When the new Queen, Thia's sister, realizes that their kingdom's only option is for Thia to marry Ericen, the crown prince of Illusia, Thia, despite her rage at the cruel prince and his cruel kingdom, falls even further into despondency. Then she discovers something: one surviving Crow egg. Armed with the hope that the Crow might bring her kingdom back to power and prosperity, Thia is determined to do what needs to be done---for revenge.
Thoughts:
This was a decidedly solid YA fantasy novel. The world-building was logical and strong, the politics and magic systems were quite interesting. I liked the settings, liked the intrigue, liked the Crows (despite the fact that the idea of rooks and Crow Riders made me compare every twist of Thia's story to Manon's from the Throne of Glass series, which. Well, it made her not look to great in comparison).
Definitely the most interesting part of the book was the seamless integration of mental illness and queerness into a fantasy world. A huge portion of the secondary characters were gay, though that idea imparted through crushes and same-gender spouses rather than any our-world terminology. Mental illness, on the other hand, was portrayed using the term "depression," which I thought was very interesting, since I honestly don't know if I've ever seen the direct terminology used in a fantasy novel. The book had a very compassionate perspective on depression and the lack of choice it involves, and the metaphor of a heavy snake that narrator repeatedly used to describe the sensation of heaviness associated with depression was fascinating. Although I do believe that regular mainstream YA fantasy, as it appears in this book, is getting a bit trite and overdone, I also think that this book is indicative of a trend toward more real-world issues being tackled in fantasy, which I love.
The biggest problem that I had with this book were the characters. They simply fell flat. It made sense for Thia to have a slightly discontinuous perspective on things, since her depression affected her differently on different days, but the scenes when her emotions were supposed to be logical made me absolutely crazy. She was quick to anger, but her anger was so utterly ineffective that it made her a pretty incompetent character. She was incapable of holding her tongue, recognizing the mind-games of an enemy court, and actually trying to get what she wanted instead of just allowing everyone around her to have more power and laugh at her. Her incompetence was hard to read, but right at the end of the book she gained some understanding of how to play the game, so hopefully book two will be better on that front. The other characters also fell a bit flat. Kiva, Thia's best friend, was loyal and gay. I do not think she did a single thing while Thia was not present, despite their spending a fair amount of time apart. Prince Ericen was the stereotypical dark prince with an evil mother who might be a bit moral, maybe? He had no other character traits aside from a pretty wishy-washy moral grayness. The second love interest was a bit more interesting, but still. All the characters had very little existence outside of their relationship to the protagonist.
This isn't to say I didn't enjoy reading the book; I intend to find a copy of the second book in the series soon. I just hope that the author continues to forward her world-building and representation of real-world issues, and gets her characterization to a point where it's a bit more exciting, and a bit more continuous.