Wednesday, March 10, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: A River of Royal Blood by Amanda Joy

 




A River of Royal Blood is a YA Fantasy novel written by Amanda Joy and the first half of a duology that is being concluded in March of 2021.  It's a book I might have skipped, except that it showed up on a Tor.com listicle filled with other interesting books that I'd enjoyed and the book was immediately available from one of my elibraries. So I picked it up, noticed how short it was and how many books I was due to have off hold soon, and figured I'd shortcut it to the front of my reading list. 

And A River of Royal Blood is solid and fine YA Fantasy, but it very much fails to go beyond that.  The story features a princess (Eva) who possesses a potentially horrifyingly violent magic in a world where human princesses have to fight each other to the death in order to determine who becomes Queen....of a kingdom filled with other races whom seem to have second-class citizen status.  It's a solid setup, and the main character is enjoyable, but the book is too short to truly go through all the implications or to setup the book's main antagonist in a way that gives her the depth she really needed. 

More after the jump:

------------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
Princess Eva was born under a blood moon, an open of great change, which was only confirmed when the Sorceryns determined the magic lying within her: Marrow and Blood, the terrifying long-lost magic of the human queendom of Myre's first human queen - Raina, the woman who killed her own sister and led and uprising against their Khimaer rulers.  Eva wants little to do with her magic - fearful of the deadly power it represents - and has never been able to use it; after all, there is no one in the queendom who remembers it and what it can do.  If Eva would be queen she would like to forment change in the queendom, working to make it better for the non-human races...especially the Khimaer people with their animal-like traits who are oppressed inside the country they once ruled.  

But Eva knows she will never be Queen....and that she is likely not to survive long past her upcoming 17th birthday: for that is when tradition dictates that she and her older sister Isa battle it out to the death as rival heirs for the throne.  Eva loves her sister and the feeling was at one point mutual, but Isa possesses powerful compulsion magic and a clear desire for the throne that Eva lacks, so what chance does she have against her?  And so it seems to dream of survival or more is pointless....at least until Eva discovers a long lost godling who could teach her about her magic.  

But assassins are suddenly coming for Eva and secrets are being revealed around her, and what Eva truly knows about everything is being questioned, which will force Eva to decide whether she truly wants to fight....for the throne, for the people around her, and for her life......
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A River of Royal Blood is, prologue and epilogue aside, told entirely from the perspective of Eva, who is a pretty solid character.  Eva is the second child of the Queen, a queen who has seemingly lost favor in her father and openly has a paramour at her side like a consort and who seemingly prefers Eva's sister Isa for the throne.  Which is especially a problem when tradition dictates Isa and Eva battle to the death in under a year for the right to be the next heir - and it seems to result in the Queen not trying to help Eva manage or learn her magic to give her a fighting chance.  Add to the fact that Eva possesses the magic that allowed the kingdom's first queen to massacre thousands of Khimaer, take over the kingdom, and force the Khimaer to live in "enclosures" (think reservations) and well...Eva doesn't even like the idea of using her own magic to survive in the end, which just compounds the problem.  This, when added to Eva's good heart and wish for change (with a rational understanding* of how difficult change is) makes her an easy character to root for.  And Eva's story about learning to accept who she herself is, magic and all, and not letting her physical/magical gifts decide who she wants to be is genuinely well done and interesting.

*Eva is asked at one point if revealing the lies about the Khimaer massacres and how necessary their oppression is will change everything, and in a nicely done notable moment for this book, she concludes that no, it wouldn't be enough on its own and that more active measures would be needed.  Which doesn't stop her from also concluding later that the lies themselves have done tremendous damage.*

Unfortunately for this story, Eva is really the only character who gets great development.  Some of the side characters are interesting, particularly the godling (demigod) fae Baccha, and the seemingly obligatory YA fantasy romance works fine, but the story's antagonists remain largely nameless throughout - you will have an idea of whom the assassins might be working for by the end of the book, but it's never actually revealed here for example.  That might have worked, but the story also neglects to develop the character of Isa, who is very much a contradictory character: a girl who seemed from Eva's perspective to love Eva until Eva ran away after Isa first discovered that the two of them would have to kill one another - although how she shows that love often feels from the outside as just being a spoiled brat honestly - and who now seems to have no compunction against using her compulsion magic on anyone...not least of all Eva herself.  And yet Isa also seems to show some hesitation on killing Eva and has a genuinely good point that Eva has no idea of how ruling works due to her being away from Court and not trying to learn about internal politics at all.  

Like I think the book is trying to argue that Isa is not necessarily a bad person and that there is clear tragedy in her being set up to fight Eva...except Isa's use of compulsion magic clearly contradicts that, and we see nothing about Isa's behavior towards the oppressed non-humans, particularly the Khimaer, until one confusing climactic scene in which her motivations could go either way.  So again it's hard to know whether Isa would actually be the worse Queen or if she might actually be better off dead!  Which is a problem, the book basically can't seem to decide what it wants her to be - to be fair, some of that is deliberate as Eva is unsure - which makes it hard to get invested in the conflict between sisters that closes out the end of the book.  

Again the book's setup works generally well and Eva's character development works pretty well, so this is a pretty solid YA Fantasy Book.  But it's very short and really could've used another 50-100 pages fleshing out it's side characters so that the reader can feel invested in the external conflicts as much as the internal ones.  Instead those external elements either feel confused or just formulaic, which is a bit of a miss.  

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