Two Dark Reigns

Katharine, Arsinoe, and Mirabella return in the third installment of the Queens of Fennbirn series that began with Three Dark Crowns. Now that we’re almost halfway through the series, we have a queen on the throne, low magic running rampant, a mist that cannot be stopped, and more. I’ve read the books in this series as they came out, with a steady break in between, but wow this book feels absolutely different than the others in all the best ways. Things have finally kicked into high gear and now that the Ascension year is over, the stakes are higher than ever.

Katharine has assumed the throne, buoyed by the spirits of the dead queens she acquired by falling into the Breccia Domain, but things are not going well in the kindgom. Her king-consort is dead, and she’s paying reparations to his family to keep the true cause of his death a secret. The mist is acting…oddly, and it’s spelling trouble for a troubled queen, called Undead by her people. Mirabella and Arsinoe escaped to the mainland, but there’s something calling them back to Fennbirn. Will the Goddess truly ever let them go? Can she? Then there’s Jules, who is trying to understand what her Legion curse means for her and the island, and when she discovers a prophecy that says she may be queen again and a group of rebels that want her to assume the throne, things get complicated.

Ya’ll know I don’t usually like fantasy books, but I am a slut for books about royalty, so here we are. Thank God for Owlcrate introducing me to this series, which is dark and complex and keeps taking me somewhere I didn’t know I could go.I love the interweaving backstory of the island we get in this book and in the Oracle Queen novella and right now I’m praying for a Daphne/Illian spin off series set in the past at the creation of the mist, but I may have to wait. In the meantime, I’ll look forward to the fourth and final book in this series, probably not hitting shelves until 2019 or 2020.