Review: The Impostor Queen – Sarah Fine

the imposter queenSixteen-year-old Elli was a small child when the Elders of Kupari chose her to succeed the Valtia, the queen who wields infinitely powerful ice and fire magic. Since then, Elli has lived in the temple, surrounded by luxury and tutored by magical priests, as she prepares for the day when the Valtia perishes and the magic finds a new home in her. Elli is destined to be the most powerful Valtia to ever rule.

But when the queen dies defending the kingdom from invading warriors, the magic doesn’t enter Elli. It’s nowhere to be found.

Disgraced, Elli flees to the outlands, the home of banished criminals—some who would love to see the temple burn with all its priests inside. As she finds her footing in this new world, Elli uncovers devastating new information about the Kupari magic, those who wield it, and the prophecy that foretold her destiny. Torn between the love she has for her people and her growing loyalty to the banished, Elli struggles to understand the true role she was meant to play. But as war looms, she must align with the right side—before the kingdom and its magic are completely destroyed.

Rating: 3.5/5

This book really took me a while to get into – I couldn’t understand all the raving ratings! It was one of those moments where I thought we must all be reading a completely different book.  However, once our protagonist left her cloistered world, things start picking up, and it was a race to the proverbial finish line – I was absorbed.

Also, we have a bisexual protagonist, which is great and I daresay still fairly unusual in YA fantasy. The male love interest is a gruff grumpy darling. He may be all dark and broody but Oskar has a lighthearted side. And he treats his momma and sister good. I also really enjoyed the fact that he does not pressure her or place conditions on her with regards to her abilities –  if she doesn’t do X, still has a home there regardless.

Elli as an MC was a tad annoying initially, but as she sort of undoes all the conditioning she was subject to in the temple, she becomes a much more interesting character with a backbone and her own desires.

ARC received from Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. 

8 thoughts on “Review: The Impostor Queen – Sarah Fine

  1. Glad this one ended up growing on you, it was one of my favorite reads of 2015 and am so glad to see other people enjoying it now!

    Deyse @ Bound With Words

    Like

  2. I read a few chapters and then the book expired on my Bluefire app. It did seem slow to me, but I often feel that way about fantasy at the beginning. I did like her other YA duology, so I will try this again!

    Like

    1. I’ve seen a lot of comments about how slow/info-dumpy it was in the beginning, so I don’t think we were the only ones. I enjoyed her other YA work, but her adult UF really grated on me!

      Like

  3. I’m just not interested in this book at all for some reason :P. But wow, a bisexual protagonist is really (& unfortunately) rare for fantasy books, I honestly don’t think I’m aware of any in high fantasy except for this one now!

    Like

    1. Ha, some books just don’t *spark* with us, no worries! But yeah, it’s pretty rare to have it blatantly depicted in fantasy, which is a sad commentary on the state of diversity in this genre.

      Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s