Three Dark Crowns

4 stars I think. This was great and helped pull me out of my reading slump. Full review to come!FULL REVIEW:I'm a huge YA Fantasy fan, so when I heard the pitch for [a:Kendare Blake 4086715 Kendare Blake https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1276645449p2/4086715.jpg]'s Three Dark Crowns, I was definitely curious. Combined with an awesome cover and an unusual tense choice (third person present) and I was glad I picked it up.Initially I was a little confused about why there were so many POVs—I was expecting three (one for each princess) and I think we end up with...five? Something like that. For the first portion of the book, I know the many POVs made it difficult for some people to get into it. I just rolled with it, and in the end it made sense as to why every POV was necessary. I will say I did find it a little difficult to keep track of all the names and places (the map helped with the latter, though), so sometimes I confused characters. But once I got used to the cast, that became no longer distracting. So that said, there were two things I really liked about this book: the magic, and the sisters themselves. There are a lot of takes on magic in YA, and many of them look like Mirabella: some sort of elemental stuff with extras thrown in. Nothing wrong with that, I love elemental magic portrayals, but I was really fascinated by the magic of the poisoners and naturalists. The poisoners especially was magic I hadn't seen before in YA, and it was super fascinating to see how that magic manifested (or how it was supposed to manifest, anyway), how it affected the way other people looked at them, and how they “showed it off” to demonstrate power—and the ruse of power. What I really liked about the sisters was they exceeded my expectations in multiple ways. I'd expected Mirabella to be the “evil twin” in the sense that as the most powerful (whether she knows it or not) she'd be biting at the bit to take out her other two sisters, but she was much more complicated than that. But what I especially loved about the three was they demonstrated a variety of ways to “be a girl” without ever implying one way is better than the other. Katherine and Mirabella are both traditionally feminine and take power in their femininity—which was awesome to see. On Fennbirn, women are the top of the power totem pole, so the girls never deal with misogyny and in many ways, their femininity was used as a display of power (yay!). Arsinoe, however, is an entirely different kind of girl. She's defiant, cuts her hair short, and never once wears a dress—even in the scenes where the girls are expected to dress formally, she stands beside her two sisters in dresses wearing a black shirt, vest, and pants. I loved this, because I've literally never seen a princess portrayed as anything short of femininely unless she was in disguise—and as a bonus, Arsinoe never gets any grief over it. She's accepted as she is, and while acknowledged as different, no one ever implies her less feminine style is a bad thing. So all in all, I found this book fascinating—and I was so glued I read sixty percent of it in one day. While I didn't love some of the details at the end, I really enjoyed this one overall and I'm very much looking forward to the next book, [b:One Dark Throne 29923707 One Dark Throne (Three Dark Crowns, #2) Kendare Blake https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1487862160s/29923707.jpg 50306201]. Diversity note: From what I could tell, not much there, unfortunately.

This book was not great. Not terrible either though. And considering my feelings on Anna Dressed in Blood that's really not a huge surprise. Kendare Blake writes to a younger portion of the YA demographic, and has a gift for unique stories and creating some evocative scenes and moments. But her style is...gentle. I was not expecting anything earth-shattering. But with such a great premise as this, I was definitely hoping for more.

The three 16-year-old queens of a remote magical island are sisters Arsinoe, Katharine and Mirabella. In order for one of them to ascend to the throne, the other two must die. Thankfully, they all have super powers to aid them in this endeavor, but sadly Arsinoe and Katharine's powers have yet to manifest, while Mirabella's are flourishing with leaps and bounds. But things aren't that simple. While Mirabella can generate storms and dance with fire, she has intimate memories of her sisters that she's not supposed to have, and the thought of doing them harm paralyzes her. Meanwhile, Katharine may not be able to hold down her belladonna like she should, but she's a masterful poisoner raised by some pretty scary people, and Arsinoe is tough as nails even if she can't make a single bud bloom. It's a great set up, with some really interesting world-building to support it. But I don't think Blake started this story near enough to its end.

The premise of this book is striking, but the storytelling feels lazy. There's a lot of time spent of each of the queens in their own worlds, with their friends and falling in love with boys. I'm not sure why. Katharine's story line with Pietyr was probably the most interesting to me, maybe just because the poisoners seem strange and wicked and glamorous and I am very about that. Mirabella's story also isn't bad since it is more closely tied to the central conflict, but it could have easily been condensed. Her poorly thought out plans to run away multiple times felt silly. Why bother with a contrived reason for Mirabella to bump into Arsinoe when you can just move the story forward instead? We also get an additional perspective in the naturalist world from Arsinoe's adoptive sister, Jules, who is probably the most talented naturalist on the island. We get to know about this cute little love story between Jules and one of her and Arsinoe's childhood friends that goes sour because Mirabella sleeps with him and....hold on, what? This is not the book I signed up for.

Instead of a more tightly wound story involving three queens plotting against each other, we get three insecure young women whose lives are controlled by the more powerful women around them. Instead of poisoner plots and palace intrigue, we get side quests and love triangles. As said, it's not awful. The queens are interesting, well-written characters who carry their stories well, and their world is a rich and intriguing one. But this book plays very light-footed with what should have been a stronger, more dangerous, more plot-driven story.

Despite this, the great question still hangs over the story, generating a lot of mystery. Were Arsinoe and Katharine swapped and are trying to manifest powers that they don't have? Is Jules secretly a queen? Does one of them have one of the other two gifts that a queen could have - the sight or the mysterious war gift? Or is it something even stranger? This is the main reason why I fully intend to read the next book, but I still wish Blake had given us more of a resolution at the end of this book and answered more of those questions. Honestly, Three Dark Crowns doesn't hold its own very well as the first installment in this series. It's not a complete story. It's more like a meandering prologue that features the emotional lives of three girls in a strange situation, and it just so happens to have a wee bit of a climax at the end.

This book is worth reading for the universe and what I am hoping will be the larger story. It's also fairly enjoyable. Not riveting and page-turning but...nice. There are worse things a book can be, I guess.

If you are intrigued by the description, read the book.

This story has so much going for it. I enjoyed it. The world and mythology are unfamiliar, giving the reader something curious to learn the whole time. This world is full of tradition and plots within plots. All along, I wanted more. I think the story should have been much longer. I know it is a series and it continues after this book - what I mean is that this part of the story needed more words. The characters needed more time to help readers get to know them. The world and mythology needed more backstory.

Besides there being something missing, there was too much awkward teenage romance - even for an young adult novel. Most was unnecessary - even with love interests and jealousy helping to drive the plot forward.

All of that being said, the story is interesting and worth a read.