Ansa has always been a fighter. As a child, she fought the invaders who murdered her parents and snatched her as a raid prize. She fought for her status as a warrior in her tribe, but the day the Krigere cross the great lake and threaten the witch queen of the Kupari, everything changes.

Rating:  ★★★☆☆ – liked it
Genre:  young adult fiction, ya fantasy
Pros:  queer protag, better than the first book, many strong women
Cons:  not exciting, not enough main characters of color

The Cursed Queen is the sequel to The Impostor Queen, but the events of this book actually run almost parallel to the events of the first book, only advancing the timeline a little bit from the end of The Impostor Queen. (Which does make sense, because we would want to know what led the Valtia to meet the Astia, wouldn’t we?) I went into this book expecting to learn what happened after the rebellion of Impostor, and in that respect I was mostly disappointed.

However, the story itself was not a disappointment at all. In fact, Cursed was (in my opinion) an improvement on Impostor. The events were slightly less predictable and the pacing was better. In Imposter I spent a major portion of the book begging for something to start happening, but in this one things were happening from minute one. And even when major things weren’t happening, the intrigue and Ansa’s struggling with the curse keep things from getting too dull. There’s no real urgency, but it moves along well and it’s easy to continue reading at a steady pace.

I enjoy queer representation in my books, but I get tired of just reading books about people being afraid to come out or fighting to be accepted by family and friends for their sexuality, so this book was a welcome relief. The main character isn’t straight and a lot of background characters aren’t either, but even when there is relationship drama it has nothing to do with their sexualities.

I do wish there had been more main characters that were POC. Almost every main character is white, despite being set mostly in a city of POC (stolen by the mostly white Krigere). I’d say this is yet another one of those books that does better than others on representation, but not quite good enough.

There was a very nice scene where a black character, belonging to the subjugated city, tells a white character that while it’s cool she’s not actively trying to kill them, by not fighting back against the other white people who are subjugating the city (of black people), she’s still basically complicit and not technically a good person. Excellent scene. (I’m not going to tag this as a spoiler because it doesn’t give away any plot points.)

Despite the protag being white, this is not a White Savior story. It looks like it might be for a bit, but it turns out better. I can’t explain much without giving away major spoilers, but I’ll put it down in the Spoiler section just in case someone wants it.

The best thing about this book was the variety of strong female characters. Some are strong in family, some clever and sneaky, some fierce fighters, some good survivors. A lot of times when you say strong female character you just get a fighter, but this book showed many different ways a woman can be strong and I really enjoyed that.

It’s nice to see that Ansa is very different from Elli. You can clearly see how they could balance each other out or clash horribly (or maybe both), and I look forward to seeing them come together in The True Queen.

I recommend this book to those who liked The Impostor Queen for sure, but even if you didn’t love that one, you may like The Cursed Queen. If you are a fan of Magical YA Fantasy or, like me, crave books with queer representation that isn’t all about how hard it is to come out, you should give this book a shot.

Don’t expect to be blown away, this book isn’t amazing, but it is a good, solid, 3-star book. The draw would be the content, not the writing style.

Spoiler Zone

I have one thing I want to talk about regarding relationships that includes a pretty decent sized spoiler so only read it if you don’t mind that:

[start] I was really wary for a good half or more of the book that this was going to follow the same path of the last book relationship-wise. That is, the girl starts out with a crush on a girl, but later meets a boy who is perfect for her and falls for him instead (with possible death of the girl). It would have set a disturbing pattern of “fixing” the bi girl, but luckily that didn’t happen. [end]

Re: Not A White Savior (Seriously, this is a major spoiler, think before you read.)

[start] The people of Vasterut are black, the people of the Krigere, who took the city, are (mostly) white. In most books like this, little white Ansa would come along with her magic and rescue the subjugated Vasterutians. However, in this story, the Vasterutians have been working to free themselves before Ansa’s tribe even arrives in the stolen city. They have built allies and networks, but have hit a snag in their plans. The white Chieftain Thyra helps them, but only in a diversionary way, and ultimately it is the Vasterutians and the allies they made for themselves who free their city from Krigere control. Ansa’s actions during the revolt are solely related to her lady-love Thyra, and prior to that she was merely a pawn of the Vasterutians to help distract the Krigere. So as I said, the white people do not save or free the black people in this book. [end]

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