Four Dead Queens Review

Four Dead Queens tells the assasination story of the four rulers of a matriarchal society, and the young thief and messenger that find themselves caught up in the conspiracy. Told from our heroines POV as well as the queens, you get to see the action from multiple angles. I like the use of multiple POV’s but feel like the implementation was off. Timeline inconsistencies just make the book feel awkward. The flow of the book as a whole would have felt better had the timeline been more consistent without effecting the plot as a whole. I get what the author was trying to do but it just felt like complexity for the sake of complexity and didn’t add to the readers enjoyment.

Keralie isn’t a terrible heroine but she is really naive and shallow at times. She is mean for the sake of being mean, with little reason to be that way. A good backstory of a tortured past is key to a good anti-hero but that’s lacking here. Varian is just bland. Flipping the script on the typical good girl bad boy trope could be great but again it fell flat in execution. There is little reason for the two of them to fall in love. The enemies to lovers trope is one of the weakest I have read. Its missing the angst needed to be truly successful.

While enough explanation and world building was given to understand the world and political landscape, it was just the bare minimum. Unbelievable and overly simplified, the world felt thrown together with little thought behind it. The idea is put forth that each quadrant has a symbiotic relationship with the others, providing each other with resources but severely limited in scope to keep each individual society “pure”. Logically this is ridiculous. The main example given is the agrarian society can’t have electricity because with the introduction of farm machinery the land could become overworked and infertile. While that’s possible its completely ignoring that fact that you have another quadrant that is highly technologically advanced. You telling me they couldn’t come up with something that would help with crop production and land fertility when they are literally genetically altering human evolution? So instead of allowing the sharing of knowledge and technology they would rather artificially control population through forced euthanasia? The logical inconsistency with this is completely unbelievable and breaks immersion for me.

Overall Four Dead Queens isn’t a bad book, it’s just mediocre and thrown together. Everything in the book just seems to exist with little reasoning behind it. I found myself being distracted away from reading easily by every little notification on my phone and having to tell myself to continue reading.