If you’ve been following me through Social Media, you would know that one of my goals for this year is to write reviews for every book that I read.
To be fair, I read Three Dark Crowns last year. But since it’s the first book in a series it makes sense to start my reviews for this year with this one. So Three Dark Crowns was my last read of 2019 and first review of 2020.
These books caught my attention sometime during June last year. Somehow I was quite sure that I will enjoy these books. I got the first three books and the novella when I went to India in July. But the last book was due for release only in September.
As you must know by now, I really cannot start a series unless I have all the books with me. I’m not known for my patience. I cannot wait between books. So I decided not to start reading them until I got my hands on Five Dark Fates too.
I was absorbed with completing my goal of 100 books and I did not get a chance to make the purchase until December. My son came back from his vacation in India today and he brought Five Dark Fates with him.
Ideally, I wanted to start 2020 with this series. But I finished reading all of my library books and still had 2 days to go in 2019. Even though I had reached my goal, I didn’t want to spend the last 2 days of 2019 without reading anything. And that’s how I started the series last year.
Now let’s come to my take on the book.
I had read the synopsis. So what I expected was to read about one good queen and 2 bad ones and how the good queen discovers herself and overcomes the others amidst a lot of self-doubt and betrayals. I mean that’s how most of my YA reads have been. I didn’t really expect anything much different from this either.
But I was surprised to find that I was completely wrong. Each of the queens are given equal importance. They all have their good and bad sides. Just when you start thinking that this particular queen is going to be the good one, something completely unexpected happens and we start doubting our loyalty.
I started the book with the notion that I will be rooting for one person. By the end of the book, I’m still not sure who I want to succeed. Maybe I want all of them to succeed. Maybe that’s how the series is going to be. But with all the twists and turns, one can never be sure about anything. That’s what I loved about this book.
One downside I felt was that there were too many characters. Generally I’m not someone who finds it difficult to keep track of all the characters. But I found it a bit difficult in this one. I think all the character establishments were not done properly. Also, it would have been really helpful if there was an index with all the character names and their relationship to the queens. I searched for this when I was confused. The index would have helped.
And of course it is not as gripping as a thriller book which is what I look for in a book. But this is just me. For a YA read, it’s quite good. Other than the difficulty in tracking the names of all characters, I couldn’t find any downside.
All in all, it was a good read with some pleasant surprises along the way. I’m definitely looking forward to the next book.
