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The Queen's Necklace - Teresa Edgerton
After rereading Goblin Moon and The Gnome's Engine, which I already had, I decided to try one of her other books. This one had a very pretty cover:
I really enjoyed it, with some caveats. It was pleasantly nostalgic and just - fun to dive into an 80s/90s-style epic fantasy that I've never read or even heard of, with maps and a 3-page character list in the front. And the worldbuilding is interesting and unusual. It felt rushed at the end, or maybe more like the plot that started out the book wasn't exactly the plot that ended the book, and a few threads got dropped along the way. I had a similar feeling to The Gnome's Engine where this may have been more than one book that ended up being compressed into one. But it was a very enjoyable read.
The book takes place in a world in which cruel, decadent Goblins ruled over Humans until an uprising and subsequent massacre of the Goblin ruling class. The modern world of the book's time period consists of a series of small kingdoms that share a carefully static culture designed on a quasi-religious framework to prevent empire-building from ever happening again. (This part is never really addressed except with occasional reference to a few of the details, such as the royal families of each kingdom being forbidden to marry each other. The Gnome's Engine duology also has a similar vague international utopia that never really explains how it works except just that people in this world do this. Anyway, in this case the currently ruling Humans have a horror of international conflict and empire-building due to having been slaves for most of their history.)
Each Human kingdom possesses one of a set of rare treasures from the previous Goblin empire, powerfully magical jewels whose manufacture is no longer understood. Each of them performs a vital service for the kingdom where it belongs - in one, it prevents the volcano around which the kingdom is built from erupting; another holds up the complex of mining tunnels that supports the kingdom's mining industry; another prevents ships from being dashed on the dangerous rocks surrounding their harbor, and so forth. The jewels are in sympathetic vibe with their kingdom, so if they are removed, as well as no longer preventing the Bad Stuff from happening, they tend to cause widespread disasters - floods, earthquakes, outbreaks of disease, and so forth.
Obviously someone is about to steal one.
There are actually three different plot threads in the book, all of them happening at different times, rotating through each set of characters. The constant bouncing around in time/season disconcerted and frustrated me at first, before I got used to it.
- In the earliest timeline, about a year before the "now" of the book's plot, the last surviving heir of the Goblin ruling house, the Maglore, who has been raised in secret, uses a magical mind-control necklace to charm the king of a small northern kingdom. She is being used as a catspaw by her relatives to reclaim the dominion they have lost.
- In the intermediate timeline, a scholar and adventurer who believes that the history as currently written (about the Goblin empire and the human uprising) is full of gaps and lies, is traveling the world to try to prove his theories. Along the way he meets a strange fellow traveler from a weird religious sect, and begins to uncover a conspiracy.
- In the "now" timeline, a young noblewoman in a landlocked rural kingdom (in complete secret from her husband and most of her family) is initiated into a secret society of magicians who exist to stop the Goblins from taking over if they ever rise again. Meanwhile, her arranged-married and estranged husband carouses around town, cheating on her and engaging in all sorts of scandals, while secretly operating as a spy and operative for the king, and is tasked with uncovering a plot to steal their kingdom's jewel.
As you can see, there is a LOT going on.
Having the multiple timelines running at once meant that various characters discover different pieces of the same puzzle at different times. I found most of them interesting most of the time, and didn't mind most of the jumps, although there were times when I was particularly invested in one set of characters and then we'd jump to another and it's like OH COME ON, I was enjoying the other ones!
By their nature, all the different kingdoms are very culturally similar and don't change much, but there are lush descriptions of slums and swamps, crumbling Goblin palaces and weird little built-up mountain towns.
Bigger spoilers ahead!
My greatest source of frustration with the book was with Lili and Will, the "now" characters and the ones we spent the most time with, as they separately investigate the same crime and slowly rebuild their failing marriage. I really enjoyed Lili, a resourceful magician-in-training with healing powers. Will I mostly wanted to strangle, in particular because he cheats on her pretty much nonstop, but becomes wildly jealous if she so much as talks to another man. I was never nearly as on board with their romance as the book wanted me to be, mostly because my entire being was consumed with LILI DESERVES BETTER every time Will was on the page, and especially every time that the book wanted me to buy into the idea that Will is being forced to cheat on her because she's frigid in bed. I think I would have been a lot more okay with Lili/Will as endgame with sufficient groveling or Will going through a lot more hell than he does, or AT LEAST have some kind of visible and obvious change of heart. But the book wants me to think that the person who mainly has to change is Lili (by learning to let him in and stop being so resistant to a marriage that neither of them wanted) and NOPE.
On the other hand, the falling together of the various plotlines and the reveals on how they're connected was very satisfying! I did guess quite a bit of it as the pieces clicked together, but some parts I missed that gave me little "oh!" moments (like Sophie = Sophonisba - it's so obvious and yet not). The book also throws the reader an excellent death fakeout, when two different sets of characters finally meet up in the same timeline and character set A, our viewpoint characters at that point, get into a fight with Character Set B and KILL THEM. So for a couple of pages I was just DDDDDDD: about this, but wait, it's not our second protagonists at all, it's just two people who closely resemble them in general social class/species and actually Our Heroes are somewhere else nearby on a separate branch of the same quest, and NOW they actually meet! That was really well done.
The general sense that there was way too much plot and too many characters for one book kept coming back to me at various points. In particular I felt like Blaise, Will's BFF, may have been intended to have a larger role than he did, and got sidelined because there are simply too many characters for everyone to have something to do. I also would have liked more closure on Raith at the end, as he was one of my favorites and I'd really like to know what he and Ys are up to. (I did like the vague implication that Ys - the Goblin queen of the title - might get a happier ending than dying a villain. She did very bad things, wrecked lives and killed people, but she's also a badly manipulated teenage girl raised by psychopaths. And Raith, as the only other Maglore Goblin we've ever met who isn't evil, is probably the best possible option to teach her how to live in the world with humans. I assume they're off somewhere doing something like that, but the last thing we actually see in the book is Ys stabbing him in the middle of a big climactic fight scene and both of them being presumed dead in a subsequent fire.)
I really enjoyed it, with some caveats. It was pleasantly nostalgic and just - fun to dive into an 80s/90s-style epic fantasy that I've never read or even heard of, with maps and a 3-page character list in the front. And the worldbuilding is interesting and unusual. It felt rushed at the end, or maybe more like the plot that started out the book wasn't exactly the plot that ended the book, and a few threads got dropped along the way. I had a similar feeling to The Gnome's Engine where this may have been more than one book that ended up being compressed into one. But it was a very enjoyable read.
The book takes place in a world in which cruel, decadent Goblins ruled over Humans until an uprising and subsequent massacre of the Goblin ruling class. The modern world of the book's time period consists of a series of small kingdoms that share a carefully static culture designed on a quasi-religious framework to prevent empire-building from ever happening again. (This part is never really addressed except with occasional reference to a few of the details, such as the royal families of each kingdom being forbidden to marry each other. The Gnome's Engine duology also has a similar vague international utopia that never really explains how it works except just that people in this world do this. Anyway, in this case the currently ruling Humans have a horror of international conflict and empire-building due to having been slaves for most of their history.)
Each Human kingdom possesses one of a set of rare treasures from the previous Goblin empire, powerfully magical jewels whose manufacture is no longer understood. Each of them performs a vital service for the kingdom where it belongs - in one, it prevents the volcano around which the kingdom is built from erupting; another holds up the complex of mining tunnels that supports the kingdom's mining industry; another prevents ships from being dashed on the dangerous rocks surrounding their harbor, and so forth. The jewels are in sympathetic vibe with their kingdom, so if they are removed, as well as no longer preventing the Bad Stuff from happening, they tend to cause widespread disasters - floods, earthquakes, outbreaks of disease, and so forth.
Obviously someone is about to steal one.
There are actually three different plot threads in the book, all of them happening at different times, rotating through each set of characters. The constant bouncing around in time/season disconcerted and frustrated me at first, before I got used to it.
- In the earliest timeline, about a year before the "now" of the book's plot, the last surviving heir of the Goblin ruling house, the Maglore, who has been raised in secret, uses a magical mind-control necklace to charm the king of a small northern kingdom. She is being used as a catspaw by her relatives to reclaim the dominion they have lost.
- In the intermediate timeline, a scholar and adventurer who believes that the history as currently written (about the Goblin empire and the human uprising) is full of gaps and lies, is traveling the world to try to prove his theories. Along the way he meets a strange fellow traveler from a weird religious sect, and begins to uncover a conspiracy.
- In the "now" timeline, a young noblewoman in a landlocked rural kingdom (in complete secret from her husband and most of her family) is initiated into a secret society of magicians who exist to stop the Goblins from taking over if they ever rise again. Meanwhile, her arranged-married and estranged husband carouses around town, cheating on her and engaging in all sorts of scandals, while secretly operating as a spy and operative for the king, and is tasked with uncovering a plot to steal their kingdom's jewel.
As you can see, there is a LOT going on.
Having the multiple timelines running at once meant that various characters discover different pieces of the same puzzle at different times. I found most of them interesting most of the time, and didn't mind most of the jumps, although there were times when I was particularly invested in one set of characters and then we'd jump to another and it's like OH COME ON, I was enjoying the other ones!
By their nature, all the different kingdoms are very culturally similar and don't change much, but there are lush descriptions of slums and swamps, crumbling Goblin palaces and weird little built-up mountain towns.
Bigger spoilers ahead!
My greatest source of frustration with the book was with Lili and Will, the "now" characters and the ones we spent the most time with, as they separately investigate the same crime and slowly rebuild their failing marriage. I really enjoyed Lili, a resourceful magician-in-training with healing powers. Will I mostly wanted to strangle, in particular because he cheats on her pretty much nonstop, but becomes wildly jealous if she so much as talks to another man. I was never nearly as on board with their romance as the book wanted me to be, mostly because my entire being was consumed with LILI DESERVES BETTER every time Will was on the page, and especially every time that the book wanted me to buy into the idea that Will is being forced to cheat on her because she's frigid in bed. I think I would have been a lot more okay with Lili/Will as endgame with sufficient groveling or Will going through a lot more hell than he does, or AT LEAST have some kind of visible and obvious change of heart. But the book wants me to think that the person who mainly has to change is Lili (by learning to let him in and stop being so resistant to a marriage that neither of them wanted) and NOPE.
On the other hand, the falling together of the various plotlines and the reveals on how they're connected was very satisfying! I did guess quite a bit of it as the pieces clicked together, but some parts I missed that gave me little "oh!" moments (like Sophie = Sophonisba - it's so obvious and yet not). The book also throws the reader an excellent death fakeout, when two different sets of characters finally meet up in the same timeline and character set A, our viewpoint characters at that point, get into a fight with Character Set B and KILL THEM. So for a couple of pages I was just DDDDDDD: about this, but wait, it's not our second protagonists at all, it's just two people who closely resemble them in general social class/species and actually Our Heroes are somewhere else nearby on a separate branch of the same quest, and NOW they actually meet! That was really well done.
The general sense that there was way too much plot and too many characters for one book kept coming back to me at various points. In particular I felt like Blaise, Will's BFF, may have been intended to have a larger role than he did, and got sidelined because there are simply too many characters for everyone to have something to do. I also would have liked more closure on Raith at the end, as he was one of my favorites and I'd really like to know what he and Ys are up to. (I did like the vague implication that Ys - the Goblin queen of the title - might get a happier ending than dying a villain. She did very bad things, wrecked lives and killed people, but she's also a badly manipulated teenage girl raised by psychopaths. And Raith, as the only other Maglore Goblin we've ever met who isn't evil, is probably the best possible option to teach her how to live in the world with humans. I assume they're off somewhere doing something like that, but the last thing we actually see in the book is Ys stabbing him in the middle of a big climactic fight scene and both of them being presumed dead in a subsequent fire.)
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Given your description of their marital problems under the very spoilery cut, he sounds like a swing and a hard miss at a particular kind of rake with hidden depths, which is a bummer, because I like that kind of character when they are not a dick.
I also would have liked more closure on Raith at the end, as he was one of my favorites and I'd really like to know what he and Ys are up to.
I hope you can get someone to write it for you.
The conceit of the jewels on which the stability of the kingdom is founded is great.
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I know! I really like it too. In fact the previous series of hers that I read had a character very similar to this (rakish hero playing the role of playboy/fop while hiding a big secret), in a relationship similar to this, and it worked very well for me. And I also really love the general trope of two characters being forced into an arranged marriage before they know each other and falling in love. This should have been everything I liked, but instead it just barely missed it in an extremely frustrating way.
The conceit of the jewels on which the stability of the kingdom is founded is great.
Yes! There was some truly delightful worldbuilding in this.
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Is it in continuity with the previous two books you read by her or a separate secondary world of its own?
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It's a separate world, not at all related as far as I can tell (except a certain amount of bleedover in ambiance - the author clearly likes writing in a milieu vaguely similar to 17th/18th century courtly Europe).
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The idea of the jewels supporting each kingdom is very similar to the role of the Crowns in "Ice Crown" by Andre Norton, except that was SF not fantasy, and the Crowns were secret mind-control devices by aliens, which were not quite the same thing...
no subject