Trigger warnings: Fire, murder

6/10, Look. I tried to enjoy this novel after reading a great novel from Alan Gratz and it was a fantasy book as well but alas this kind of underwhelmed me and it was a step down from The Vanishing Deep which was written by the same author, where do I even begin. The world building was so vague, it left more questions than answers, like how come Eonia is so high tech compared to the other countries, why are there walls between them, and where did the countries and queens come from? Are there any royal families in there or are there just queens and that's it? Because that's not how monarchies work in real life since when the monarch dies someone will succeed them. The characters are so two dimensional, and the plot's pace is just so slow and full of filler, that it lost my attention and it should've been cut down during the editing process. The ending was quite interesting to say the least when one queen didn't actually die so it should've just been called Three Dead Queens and the villain was stopped way too quickly and the only motive was that she wanted to rule all of Quadara all by herself which was kind of predictable. ( )

Esteve muito perto de levar as 5 estrelas.
Da maneira que está escrito não se torna massudo mas fiquei com a sensação que existem alguns pormenores onde a autora poderia ter ido mais além.
( )

There are a lot of things to like about Four Dead Queens. Unfortunately, there are also things to dislike and sadly, I’m here to tell you that the popular observations about this book are true, and it’s a huge detriment to its overall enjoyability. I don’t regret reading Four Dead Queens – it surprised me sometimes, disappointed me other times, but was an interesting adventure overall.

I’ll start with the biggest thing, the thing all the reviews are talking about. Four Dead Queens is lacking in execution. It’s all over the place with six different POVs, messy pacing, and too many things it’s trying to accomplish. Either side of the story would have been sufficient in itself. I get how there are so many different perspectives to any event, but the reader doesn’t need to know so many of them. It muddles the plot. The story is not quite about Keralie, not quite about the Keralie/Varin love story, not quite about a coup, and not quite about Queen Marguerite’s big secret. Scholte seems to have struggled for balance between all these things – while it’s important to have subplots, all of these things are given similar weights in the story and fade in and out in importance at different times. It makes the book feel like it has four halfhearted plots instead of one strong central plot and three interesting subplots. In that way, it was difficult to be attentive for the first three-quarters of the story. Nothing was really moving.

On the other hand, Scholte had some interesting world building in Four Dead Queens. The idea of the quadrants mixes fantasy with science fiction and plays with a few favorite tropes to build something different than a lot of fantasy books coming out right now. The world building is stronger in the beginning, when the queens are not dead (I’m sorry, it’s not a spoiler if it’s in the title) – as the story progresses, it fades to focus on a single quadrant with a few nods to another. As such, Four Dead Queens left a lot of areas unexplored. Given the already scattered nature of the book, I understand that choice, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I would have liked to see more.

Eonia, on the other hand, is a bit overall sketchy. There are a lot of ableist views in the quadrant, the most blatant one being assigned “death dates”. This is the quadrants way of preserving resources – they kill citizens when they reach an age where they become a “burden to society”. This includes older citizens, but also people with disabilities. I don’t think I need to explain why that is extremely problematic. The view is challenged within the book, but not removed. Adding to this, there is rhetoric around life being fuller without a disability. There arena’s to this throughout the book as a cure is sought, but it plays in heaviest at the end when one character assures another they are looking for a way to remove the disability. This creates an extremely problematic precedent that those with disabilities not only have less value, but are somehow less than whole and cannot be happy. This is very much untrue – there are many paths to a happy ending.

I will give Scholte some points for tricking me and not following the path I expected for the first two thirds of the book. I was dead certain that events were going to go a certain way and characters’ secrets would be revealed and I was completely wrong. I’m still (as always) unimpressed with the love story, but character progression took a different path and I can respect that twist.

The end of the book tied up very nicely with a ribbon. It rushed through events at a pace I would have appreciated earlier in the novel. The lack of questioning about certain outlandish comments and overly convenient events annoyed me as a reader, but for someone swept up in the story, I don’t think they would have thought twice about it. The ending was too clean and easy and folks are way too accepting of certain things and it didn’t play believably to me at all.

Ultimately, Four Dead Queens was an interesting read, but I don’t think I would have picked it up if it hadn’t come in a book box such a long time ago. ( )

Well I didn't see that coming. ( )

This was pretty unexpected! I thought the time-bending with the multiple POVs was absolutely genius. I also really admire fantasy writers who can accomplish so much in a stand-alone. ( )