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Queen of the Conquered

Queen of the Conquered

Sigourney Rose is the only surviving daughter of a noble lineage on the islands of Hans Lollik. When she was a child, her family was murdered by the islands’ colonizers, who have massacred and enslaved generations of her people—and now, Sigourney is ready to exact her revenge.

When the childless king of the islands declares that he will choose his successor from amongst eligible noble families, Sigourney uses her ability to read and control minds to manipulate her way onto the royal island and into the ranks of the ruling colonizers. But when she arrives, prepared to fight for control of all the islands, Sigourney finds herself the target of a dangerous, unknown magic.

Someone is killing off the ruling families to clear a path to the throne. As the bodies pile up and all eyes regard her with suspicion, Sigourney must find allies among her prey and the murderer among her peers... lest she become the next victim.

Author: Kacen Callender | Publisher: Orbit

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Rating: 4 / 5

Big thanks to Orbit, who provided ARCs of this book at BookCon this past June! It will be published on November 12.

First of all, give me alllllll the fantasy novels written by non-binary people of color about slaves revolting against colonizers using badass magic and decade-long revenge plots. YES MORE OF THIS PLEASE.

The main character is Sigourney Rose (although she ends up with several last names throughout the book), and she’s the last surviving member of the Rose family. The story takes place in Hans Lollik, a group of colonized islands modeled after the real-life Virgin Islands. Her mother was a former slave who’d been freed and married Sigourney’s father, rising to a higher status than the other elite of the island were comfortable with.

Flash forward to today, and Sigourney is years-deep in a plot to take over as Queen of Hans Lollik, revenge her family, and free her people. She’s aided by her kraft, which allows her to experience other people’s thoughts and memories. But as she gets closer and closer to her goal, she doubts herself and her love of the power she’s seeking more and more. Will she succeed? If she does, will she actually free her people?

The first chapter of this book was AWESOME. It set the stage perfectly and cast Sigourney as a complex, troubled, determined character with all sorts of virtues and flaws. Callender does jump into the vocabulary of this world’s political system really quickly, and I felt a little lost about what all these words meant and which groups of people were whom for a little while. But stick with it, and eventually it’s all explained. I had no idea how it was going to end up until it did — it kept me guessing, then revising my guess, then going back to my original guess, to smashing my guess apart, to totally surprising me.

In the end, I was really moved by this story and the incredibly human questions it asks of us.

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