Book Review: Queen of the Tearling

The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I am going to be generous here and give this a solid 3 stars. In the end, I didn't feel like I had wasted time reading this book. Was it brilliant? No. Was I incredibly impressed, overwhelmed by the world? No, can't say that I was. BUT, eventually, this book started to show some merit, and that is why it gets 3 stars. It is a solid middle of the scale book.

First off, it started slow. When the book was originally released, I tried reading it immediately, but I never made it past the halfway point of the first chapter. I didn't connect with Kelsea's voice and I didn't care for the sulky, disgusted Queen's Guard that had traveled a long way to fetch the missing princess and bring her home to be crowned Queen. Kelsea was boring, the guard was whiny, and it all made me a little bored and tired. It was a gambit to drop the reader at the start of a journey, and while it was different at least for me, it didn't allow for the right amount of connection to develop for me with the characters. I didn't care for a lot of them so the beginning felt like I was slogging my way through some boring development.

At the same time, the writing had a habit of contradicting itself. One moment, some of the guards are handsome enough to make Kelsea blush, the next they are all OLD men, the next moment they are obviously handsome. BLEH Just stick with one sentiment, otherwise your lead starts to look like she can't think straight which makes the fact that she is meant to be Queen a very disappointing prospect. The contradicting eventually disappeared but the fact that it appeared so early on in the book definitely detracted from the interest in the story. Who wants to read about a girl who changes her mind so fast, not because it is the character that changes her mind with a snap but that it is actually the author who didn't keep her writing straight?

It came off as a mistake that could have been fixed before publication or at least properly expanded so that the flow of the sentiments made sense. I'm sure the author and her editors probably read this so many times that they did not see the problem, but it ended up being very noticeable to readers because it happened during the establishment of a key character. As a result, Kelsea is a little blargh and the book has to work to bring her back to a level where the reader can like her before moving on to establish why we readers should care to finish her story. Again, at least it was weeded out later in the book. I don't like talking back to books, telling them to make up their minds already. It defeats the purpose of reading for me.


Now for the story. For the first nearly 100 pages, the bulk of the plot seemed to be simply this:

Everyone: You must be a better Queen than your mother!
Kelsea: What kind of Queen was my mother?
Everyone: *SILENCE*
Everyone: .........You must be a better Queen than your mother!

Not the best hook to get to the rest of the plot. Basically, Kelsea has been hidden away, raised by foster parents until it is safe enough for her to reclaim her throne. Her mother sent her away but Kelsea, having learned nothing of her mother over the course of her life, believes that her mother had to have been a brilliant woman. Even when faced with the undeniable fact that the truth would better suffice, no one would tell Kelsea the truth. Now, I guess I'm old hat at this by now, but I knew the previous Queen had to have botched things up pretty badly. It was obvoius from the get-go.

The fact that it took so LONG for those revelations to hit made it seem like it was dragged out for non-existent tension. Again, it didn't help my interest in the book. After that, Kelsea works to establish herself as a different Queen, one that will protect her people. She is ashamed of her family, unsure of who her father is, wary of the nobles in her court, hostile to the church that wants to control her and determined to gain the respect of her guard. The rest of those plot points are interesting, it just took a while to get there and the hiding of the info about the previous Queen was just too obvious to have real impact on the story and the reader.

And now for the world-building, or the weird mish-mashed bits of it we readers got. Now, I had read other reviews that warned me about the supposed references that suggested that this book takes place in OUR future, but I had hoped they were wrong. Once I started reading the proof for myself, I hoped the book would expand and explain. If not for those references, I could have accepted this as a solid fantasy addition, set in a country called the Tearling. The fact that those references were added in was disappointing. I did not want to read a book with a future in which the whole of our society had managed to slide back into the values of the medieval era for no apparent reason.

Carts, horses, farms, slaves, disease, lack of education, almost no rights for women, swords, archers, armies, towers, and apparently magic. Yup, sounds exactly like what I figured our future would turn out to be. It just made more sense that it was a world different from our own or at least a possibilty in our past. The fact that it seems to be set in our future just doesn't make much sense and it definitely does not inspire hope for ourselves. Fingers crossed that this has some development in Book 2.

So why 3 Stars? The characters. At some point in this book, the characters started to draw me in. I am not too impressed with Kelsea, but I think Andalie is interesting. I want know more about Marguerite and the Mace and the Fetch. Somewhere in this book, the characters began to shape themselves into interesting enough people that I wanted to learn more about.

Plot can be fixed, world-building can be expanded in the next book, but if the characters don't breathe, the whole book doesn't work. There is nothing of merit to work with. But the characters did begin to make sense enough that what little there was of the plot (a young Queen must save her country from forces of evil?) didn't matter as much as the way the characters moved in each scene.

I hope to see more of what I liked about this book in the next one.



Rating on my Blog Scale: 6.5 Stars. To be honest, I remember liking this book, but it took reading my review over again for me to really remember this first installment. I still have yet to read the rest of the series but that doesn't mean I will not ever read them. I just have so much I want to read, I haven't gotten to these books yet.

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