Monday, November 29, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: A Queen of Gilded Horns by Amanda Joy

 




A Queen of Gilded Horns is the second half of a YA Fantasy duology by author Amanda Joy, following up on last year's "A River of Royal Blood" (My review here).  I liked some of the things A River of Royal Blood did - the setting featuring a fantasy people who used to rule who are now oppressed, the other fantasy races who mixed in, the deadly human magic, and the way the main protagonist seemed to understand how difficult things would be to change - but the book had some issues.  Namely the book failed to develop the secondary characters - especially its protagonist Eva's sister of Isa, who Eva is supposed to kill in order to grab the throne, and is meant to be somewhat tragic....but instead just comes off as evil.  Still, I was interested enough to grab this book from my e-library, since it was short enough as a read to finish. 

And well, A Queen of Gilded Horns is another good installment that frustratingly had the potential to be more than that, albeit in very different ways than its predecessor.  The book splits its narrative to include the points of view of various other characters, and works all the better for it mainly, and its protagonists Eva and Isa are really strong as they try to figure out what to do going forward in an unjust world where only they can kill one another.  The book particularly manages to redeem Isa in a way that I wished would've been done sooner, and the setting's themes of oppression and fighting back work decently well.  On the other hand, the book isn't long enough to contain all its plot threads, with one major plot thread early going absolutely nowhere, and this duology really could've been a trilogy to explore all of those ideas.  

-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
Eva's world has turned upside down.  Once, she thought her problems stemmed only from her deadly human magic - Marrow and Blood - that she didn't even know how to use, and the tradition that either she or her sister would be forced to kill the other to become the heir to the throne.  Now she knows he problems are far deeper: she is not fully human but is half Khimaer, with animal like body parts and magic hidden by her Khimaer father when she was a child - the same Khimaer people the humans stole the queendom of Myre from and then began to oppress.  And Eva knows little about how to use this Khimaer magic, and isn't helped by her fae tutor Baccha having abandoned her.  But with Eva's real heritage now fully open, she and her friends are forced to go on the run from her mother the Queen....and since Eva can't kill her sister, they take the kidnapped Isa with them as they search for a path moving forwards.  

Isa doesn't know what to make of what has happened, of Eva sparing her despite all the injustices she thinks Eva has done her, and despite the words her mother has whispered into her ear.  She doesn't really want the throne, but it's her only purpose...and she hides her own secret: She's half-fae, and uses a fae glamour to keep up her own appearance, something that she knows makes her a hypocrite.  And she can't quite understand Eva's sparing of her life - after all one of them must kill the other.  But as Eva sees her sister try to find a way to overthrow their mother's order, Isa sees that Eva desperately needs help or she'll find herself doomed to failure, and the people they care about will pay the price.  

To move the Queendom forward, Eva and Isa and their friends must work together to change a country founded on oppression.  But to bring forth that change, Eva will need to rally the Khimaer people to trust someone who is half-human, the same race that once inflicted these atrocities upon them in the first place.....and convince them that she is different from her evil mother who will stop at nothing to keep the status quo.  
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A River of Royal Blood suffered a bit because it was told entirely from the perspective of Eva, which resulted in her being a rather strong character, but also left the motivations of some of the other characters too opaque to truly work (most notably, Isa).  A Queen of Gilded Horns switches the narrative up by switching between character perspectives: So while most of the story is still told from Eva's perspective, we get significant parts from Isa's, as well as parts from Aketo's (Eva's love interest), Baccha's, and a few early parts from Ysai's (a rebel leader of the Khimaer tribes).  This doesn't always work for reasons I'll get into below, but it very much does work in at least building the perspectives of the other characters, which was badly needed.  

And so yes, this story continues to feature a strong protagonist at its center in Eva, the girl whose life has been turned upside down, who wants to do the right thing despite being told its impossible - like sparing her sister - and who isn't really sure what to do with her new magic and bodily features.  She's hurt by what she sees as Baccha's betrayal and abandonment, and without really any guidance as to what to do, and frustrated that her father didn't tell her the truth before he was killed - meaning there's almost no one she can trust to teach her about her new abilities.  But Eva remains determined to make it all work, making her incredibly likable and a solid main character to center this story around.  

But what really improves this story is Isa's point of view, which actually makes her into a character worth caring about, just as Eva does.  Last book all we saw of Isa was her callous use of her power of persuasion over people, and what looked to be simple ambition for the throne above all else.  Here, a lot of that callousness is revealed to be a daughter who was just as mistreated by her mother as Eva was, who felt abandoned by her own sister (for reasons right and wrong, but at least understandable), and who carries her own secret - her fae heritage - that her mother led her to be ashamed of.  Isa's never had any friends of her own or been good at making them, and her power lets her know how little people actually cared about her, only making it worse.  And so Isa's frustration of it all, and her struggles with Eva's mercy work really well, even if her eventual turn towards good is really obvious to any reader.  And the conflict between the sisters, and Isa's growth, really strengthens this story, as this was clearly meant to be the center of the story last book and didn't quite work out.  

That said, other additions to this story fare much less successfully.  For example, the last book's cliffhanger had Baccha abandoning Eva to answer the summons of the Khimaer tribes who remained in hiding, who may or may not be willing to trust Eva on the throne given her half human heritage (and well, her mother being evil).  And we see that subplot in a major way in the first act of this story, as Baccha and the tribes' young untrusted leader Ysai get point of view chapters to explain their perspectives, which make a lot of sense.  And then this potential new conflict....peters completely out and makes no impact whatsoever, with the Tribes eventually meeting Eva after she achieves a part of her goal, forcing Eva to undergo a test that asks her to do everything she already was planning on doing, and then makes absolutely no impact on ending conflict at all.  You could've removed them from the plot and absolutely nothing would change.  It's as if the author had another book length of plot, featuring a conflict between Ysai - who has a natural prejudice against Eva and other humans - and Eva that will require a lot of events to overcome, that was cut out, except the beginnings of this subplot were left in for some reason.  

The book does do a good job showing Isa and Eva the territory (basically a beautiful ghetto) that the Khimaer are forced to live in, and how much more human they are than well, many of the actual humans.  We also see how many humans react to the revelation that their king was a Khimaer with a shrug and a realization that it didn't really make any difference.  But the distracting sideplot, as well as the romantic sideplots remaining rather weak (Isa gets her own that works but is underdeveloped, and the secrets Aketo is keeping that threaten to impact his relationship with Eva go nowhere also), prevent this book from being as good as it could be. 

And that's made more clear with the ending, which uses a really tired trope to resolve matters in a way that allows the book to tie things up with a bow, ignoring all the talk earlier in the book and in the last one about how difficult it will be to enact change in favor of a tidy ending.  There's just so much here that clearly could've been dealt with better if the author had another book to handle it with, but is just ignored here.  

So yeah, A Queen of Gilded Horns is a solid conclusion to this duology, which showed a lot of promise, and definitely will have me curious about Amanda Joy's works going forward.  But it never hits the potential that it clearly shows, which is a little disappointing.  

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