So the Traitor Queen is Trudi Canavan’s finale to her Traitor Spy series, which is a sequel to her Black Magician series with a one-shot historical prequel called The Magician’s Apprentice. Now I’d like to start off by pointing out that I haven’t actually finished the book yet and so this review is somewhat pre-mature but I got kind of frustrated with the book and might take forever to finish it so…here goes.
It’s been over a year since I read book 2 of the Traitor Spy trilogy, The Rogue, I know this because I went to meet the lovely lady herself on her book tour of the UK.
This is a familiar wait for Mortal Instruments and Infernal Devices and many other series and maybe it’s my fault for not really keeping track of the books but I had pretty much forgotten everything that happened before. This wasn’t too much of a problem as Canavan does a wonderful job of nudging the memory when it’s relevant without spending the first two chapters summarizing the first two books. That’s not to say you can pick it up as you go if, for some reason I’d never understand, you chose to start at this particular book you’d probably be really really confused.
Now the world Canavan has built for these books is actually a pretty solid one so these books read more like ‘slice of life’ with believable real time reactions and realisations by the characters rather than continuous displays of magic. Magic is a recognised part of every day life, although not everyone is or can be a Magician. For me these books ask a lot of questions about why you do something. Can you justify doing the wrong thing for the right reasons? And sometimes there is no right answer and all of the characters go through these struggles from a multitude of perspectives which makes it a really compelling read.
The part that lost me was the romance brewing with Sonea and Regin. Now these two have history going as far back as book 2 of the Black Magician Trilogy, The Novice, where Regin bullied Sonea for being a slum girl (the only lower class citizen to ever be allowed into the Guild at the time). So they had a hate/hate relationship and Sonea got with Akarin and had Lorkin who became the main focus (ish) of the Traitor Spy trilogy.
So Sonea and Regin are twenty years on or more and ‘respect’ each other and he’s grown and up and the chemistry is getting pretty obvious that even Sonea is noticing. So I was about half way through the book, on page 300-and-something and pretty much mentally shouted at them to kiss and make out already. Now this book uses chapter changes to change focus and there were a lot of little groups of characters doing things towards the ultimate plot so I had to flick through a fair bit of book to get back to Sonea and Regin and they still hadn’t kissed. So off I flicked again and anyone who has read the last sentence of a book knows that this can make or break the entire of the read and I accidentally spoiled parts of the book for myself. Not so much plot parts because most of it’s fairly routine at this point, catch the bad guy, throw a few bolts of light, right the wrongs. But I spoiled who dies. And now I don’t really want to go back and read it to find out how they died because I liked them.
That and Sonea and Regin don’t kiss until like…near the end of the book and not very much. Obviously the book isn’t meant to be about them, they’re not the main focus anymore but Regin was married. It was made clear at the beginning of the book that his wife had been cheating on him and he’s broken it off with her and obviously this was clearing the way in the moral minds of the readers for him to pursue Sonea without anyone calling him out on it.
Personally…I’d have liked to have seen him still married and unable to resist Sonea who would have protested on a moral level and given in on a basal level but that is perhaps a little too tawdry.
So really…you can’t call this a book review as I haven’t finished the book and really haven’t talked much about anything other than my desire for a steaming romance between Sonea and Regin. (Or I’d have been happy with some Cery action cause he’s awesome too).
They’re well written books, well fleshed out characters and a strongly built world…but it was getting kind of slow and the changing between characters got tiring because it took so long to get back to them that what they were doing was getting broken up. I understand that it’s hard to depict all the characters motions in real time but I think the consequence was that it dulled the impact. Or at least for the first half of the book. Who knows, things might get pacier in the second half.
Wish me luck.
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