The Gilded Crown

I received an ARC thanks to Netgalley and Harper Voyager.  The opinions expressed are my own.

Hellevir discovers at a young age that she can enter Death and resurrect the recently dead. As a young woman, she is asked to raise the Queen's granddaughter and heir. When she does so, she finds herself caught up in political intrigue and conspiracy when all she wants is a quiet life. Things develop from there....

It started a bit slow, which is not unexpected for a first book in a series that has to do a fair bit of heavy lifting in establishing characters and world building. It definitely picked up pace as it went. 

It explores interesting (to me, at least) themes around power dynamics and religion.  There are definite parallels drawn with the spread of Christianity (in the form of the Roman Catholic Church) across Europe in the Middle Ages. 

While it is described as a romance, this isn't really very developed in this book. It is obvious who the romantic interest is meant to be, but given the circumstances (the aforementioned power dynamics being a big part) I think this is a good thing. 

The world is what I consider “generic Medieval European, although the cultural nods were a bit all over the place (Hellevir and her family read Scandinavian-ish, her mentor's name sounds French, the capital is pretty generic but with nods to Venice, etc), which I found distracting in a way that pulled me out of the story.  I think it would work better if the author stuck to on culture or avoided real world cultural references entirely.  But this is a fairly minor quibble for me.

Overall a good debut and a good story and I look forward to the next book