Sarah Fine

Review: The Impostor Queen by Sarah Fine

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Chosen to be their queen, Elli grows up surrounded by luxury only to be banished when she fails to inherit essential magic, a situation that leads to devastating revelations about her world’s magic and the role Elli was meant to play.

Rating:  ★★★☆☆ – liked it
Genre:  young adult fiction, ya fantasy, magical fantasy
Pros:  bisexual protag, interesting magical mechanics
Cons:  hard to get into, first person narration, felt a bit too long for the story

I definitely recommend this book and look forward to reading the sequel, but I think it’s important to know going in that it’s difficult to get into for quite a while. I think it took me almost half the book to actually start caring what was happening. If it hadn’t been for all the positive reviews online I wouldn’t have even kept trying.

There’s quite a bit of foreshadowing. I can’t quite decide how I feel about it. On the one hand, I love foreshadowing and always appreciate it, but on the other hand… It was really obvious foreshadowing and made the story overly predictable. Never once did I wonder what was coming, it was all pretty obvious from the very beginning, never a drop of mystery as much as the story tried.

If you are cool with first person narrators, you may not have as much trouble with this book as I did, but I really feel it hindered the story’s movement. I can only assume the intent is to keep us within the realm of what the main character knows, and have us learn as she learns, but it isn’t done well enough to feel worth it.

I did enjoy that her abilities were realistic. When she’s banished she is woefully unprepared for the real world and I appreciate that even with her book knowledge, she still had to learn how to do things. I’ve seen way too many fantasy novels where the protag is just magically good at things, but not Elli! It makes her much more relatable.

The mechanics of the magic are really interesting and I found myself glad the protag is who/what she is, as opposed to just a “late bloomer”. I won’t say more so I don’t spoil anything, but I feel like it serves the story better this way.

Spoiler Zone

That’s about everything I can say without giving spoilers, but I’ll put some of that below if anyone wants it:

[start] I really love that Oskar and Sig’s personalities resemble their ice and fire!

I love that Elli has to learn to accommodate for her missing digits, that was an excellent touch.

I am almost 100% sure that the Valtia is Soturi. [end]

Goodreads | Book Depository | Author’s Website

What Are You Reading Wednesdays: August 9, 2017

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What Are You Reading Wednesdays #WAYRW is a weekly feature on It’s A Reading Thing. Everyone is welcome to participate.

Grab the book you are currently reading and answer three questions:

  1. What’s the name of your current read?
  2. Go to page 34 in your book or 34% in your eBook and share a couple of sentences.
  3. Would you like to live in the world that exists within your book? Why or why not?

  1. The Impostor Queen (The Impostor Queen, book 1) by Sarah Fine
  2. The Valtia raises her arm, and the crowd parts to allow the men through. They stumble up the steps and throw themselves at her feet, their chests heaving.
  3. I honestly can’t even say. I’m 5 chapters in and I feel like I still know absolutely nothing about this world! It’s either really poor writing (re: world-building) or really quality writing (re: putting me in the main character’s mindset). Only time will tell I suppose!

WWW Wednesday: August 9, 2017

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Welcome to WWW Wednesday! This meme was formerly hosted by MizB at Should be Reading and revived on Taking on a World of Words. Just answer the three W’s!

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently Reading:  The Imposter Queen (The Imposter Queen, book 1) by Sarah Fine
I don’t know a whole lot about this book right now, but it feels like the right book to be starting after Jane Austen and Maureen Johnson.

It’s been on my TBR for long enough that I’m embarrassed to say exactly how long, and I’ve mentioned it in a First Lines Friday post as well.

I have high hopes for this book! It’s got fantasy and magic and royalty, what could go wrong? (I probably shouldn’t have said that…)

Recently Finished:  Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Continuing my reread of Austen novels, I grabbed my second favorite of her novels. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first time I read it, but I can’t really be too surprised considering that was 10 whole years ago!

And I finally realized what is different about the way Austen writes:  Her books read like very long, elaborate letters where the reader is the recipient! I love that!

I also love how she likes to state things as if it’s all praise and everything is lovely, but if you look past the initial words to the tone you realize she is having a dig at her own characters!
It reminds me of a thing my mom used to do. Someone would say something like “I almost got hit by a car!” and my mom would sweetly reply “I’m sorry you almost got hit by a car” and the person would thank her and go about their lives not noticing the subtle inflection on the word ‘almost’ which changes the entire meaning of the phrase!

The Last Little Blue Envelope (Little Blue Envelope, book 2) by Maureen Johnson
I started this a little early, before I had actually finished Sense and Sensibility. And I finished it faster than I expected as well.

I didn’t know I had a review in me until I sat down to write a few lines on Goodreads about who I would recommend the book to, but I did and you can read it here!

Did I mention I’m still not over the scene on page 101? You know, the scene where she gets toilet water in her hair and doesn’t wish she was still wearing it braided instead of loose and then just a few seconds later does wish she was still wearing it braided so she could feel Keith’s lips on her ear when he whispers something (and she still has toilet water hair) and then .02 seconds later is actually SWOONING LIKE A VICTORIAN LADY BECAUSE HER HORMONES ARE JUST TOO UNCONTROLLABLE! Because I’m still not over that scene even a little bit. If anything it’s getting worse.

Reading Next:  Crashed (Cold Awakening, book 2) by Robin Wasserman
This book was republished as ‘Shattered’ (and the series was previously called ‘Skinned’).

I’m going to do my best to get into Crashed because I don’t want to wait too long on this series and forget what happened in the first book.

I’m not worried the book is going to be bad or anything, I just hit a slump a while back that put me off reading it for a while. My only real concerns are Second Book Syndrome and the fact that the few times I saw Jude in book one (Skinned / Frozen) I thought he was too preachy…

I have a feeling it may be hard to get into at first (because of the SBS), but I’ll keep at it this time even if I add another book to the mix because I really want to complete this trilogy.