I can close my eyes and pretend I don’t sit on a throne of skulls, but I cannot change the truth of what I am and what brought me to this world.
- Release date : May 4th 2021
- Publishing house : Orbit
- Series : Chronicles of the Bitch Queen
- Pages : 640
Spoilers ahead
Character :
Talyien aren dar Orenar : She has gone through so many things, I’m impressed by her resilience. Her growth throughout the series is one the best I’ve seen. Her character is so detailed, fleshed-out, and raw that I can’t help but marvel at Villoso’s ability to craft such characters!
But I would have preferred you showed your hand, even if it damned our lives. Politics should have never come between us. If you loved me, you should have screamed it from one corner of the nation to the next. You should have left me with no doubts. You should have fought for us, damn you.
Talyien’s fight to shake off everyone’s expectations of her and her father’s plot can only be seen as admirable. The weight of them pressing down on her for years must be suffocating. While the past continues to haunt her, the present and future are just as bleak. A lot of people (especially from the older generation) consider children to be pawns to use to strengthen their alliances or to dispose of as needed. On the other hand, Talyien has been fighting tooth and nail to get her son back.
Strange how we leave these ghosts of ourselves in our children.
All along the book, we see that Talyien is just queen in name. At court, people are still loyal to his father and to the plan he concocted. Each warlord is serving his own purposes, no matter the blood they spill or if anything is left at the end.
Story :
As with books 1 and 2, this last instalment had me on the edge of my seat all along!
Imprisoned by her own people, Talyien is to be trialled to see if Thanh really is Rayyel’s son or not. To do so, they use magic to check his blood. Ryia, Rayyel’s mother, breathing down their neck doesn’t fix anything. Some warlords are fighting each other in one part of the country causing a lot of mayhem around them. To make matters worse, Yuebek the fifth prince of an Empire much stronger is coming to her country with an army to claim his due (marry Talyien and become dragonlord). And they also have to think about the tear in the sky caused by magic and the mad dragons/creatures/humans devastating the lands. In short, it’s a mess.
Talyien can’t catch a break and she is always tense because of all the events and discoveries. Yeshin’s plan to get Talyien to rule and to solve the situation in the Sougen is put to light. The man has been dead for over a decade but his will has longstanding effects on the realm and those inhabiting it. Talyien and other characters have been trying to put an end to how the past choices of their families shape the future of their nation.
Another fallacy of history books, this: the idea that who we are can be reduced to a few words. He was a hero. She was a villain. He was a good man. She was a whore. As if we don’t, at the very least, change a little with every shift of the wind, molding ourselves to what was done to us.
This series has been a wild ride with a lot of things happening but also with its introspective moments. « Passionate » would be the right word to describe the characters in this series. The conclusion of the series satisfied me as she wanted to get away from that life and be free to do whatever she wanted. The writing is really expressive, flowing and sometimes flowery. There were quite a lot of flashbacks and they showed us how these events shaped Talyien. This series is one of the best I’ve read and I’m looking forward to reading her next books!
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