Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake
Published: September 20th 2016 by HarperTeen
Every generation on the island of Fennbirn, a set of triplets is born: three queens, all equal heirs to the crown and each possessor of a coveted magic. Mirabella is a fierce elemental, able to spark hungry flames or vicious storms at the snap of her fingers. Katharine is a poisoner, one who can ingest the deadliest poisons without so much as a stomachache. Arsinoe, a naturalist, is said to have the ability to bloom the reddest rose and control the fiercest of lions.
But becoming the Queen Crowned isn’t solely a matter of royal birth. Each sister has to fight for it. And it’s not just a game of win or lose…it’s life or death. The night the sisters turn sixteen, the battle begins. The last queen standing gets the crown.
If only it was that simple. Katharine is unable to tolerate the weakest poison, and Arsinoe, no matter how hard she tries, can’t make even a weed grow. The two queens have been shamefully faking their powers, taking care to keep each other, the island, and their powerful sister Mirabella none the wiser. But with alliances being formed, betrayals taking shape, and ruthless revenge haunting the queens’ every move, one thing is certain: the last queen standing might not be the strongest…but she may be the darkest.
I really wanted to love this book… but I was overly disappointed. This may have been my own fault because I hyped this up a lot to myself. I’m upset that I ultimately didn’t love this much as I wanted to, but the last 15% of the book is actually what gave it an extra star! There is a lot more wrong, for me, then there is right…
Firstly, there were WAY TOO many characters being introduced all at once! It made for a really confusing beginning, especially because I kept forgetting who everyone is, what their roles were and where they actually were. When I put the book down to do normal every day things and then came back to it, I actually had to go back some pages just to figure out where I was in the book – as well as who was who. I found it way too easy to forget which characters were with which queens and where these queens were in general geography of the book.
Another major issue I had with this book was that the plot was too slow for me. The book sort of plodded along at a less than average pace and it took ages for anything substantial to happen. Sometimes there would be something interesting, but it lacked the explanations to go with it, which then made it slow and confusing. I feel like there was definitely not enough information given about Beltane and I would have loved to have known more!
I also felt like the characters bled together sometimes? I sometimes forgot which characters I was actually looking at because the individual voices weren’t always there. This can become a major issue when dealing with so many different character voices and this definitely became an issue in this book for me!
The last sort of 15% of the book had me hooked all over again. I was questioning whether I had actually read the book right in the first place because it seemed to jump up quite a few notches pace wise! Things got really interesting really quickly and there are now so many misunderstandings that could be used to form the most amazing plot! Especially the twist at the end! I cannot even begin to tell you guys who exciting the twist as at the end… mostly because I was not even expecting it in the slightest! I am interested to see where this author is going to go with this!
Mostly I was underwhelmed by this book in a major way, which is a shame! I wish I had loved it more – which may have been the problem to begin with! I was hyping it up way too much! I’m glad I didn’t call DNF about half way through like I was planning, just for that ending! I gave this book 2.5/5 stars.
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