The Shadow Queen - Anne Bishop
This is the latest book in the Black Jewels world, which showed up in the original trilogy of Daughter of the Blood, Heir to the Shadows, & Queen of the Darkness. The idea is that the status structure of our world is reversed, so that women of the magic-using class are the rulers, men of the magic-using class have a need to serve a queen, & darkness is viewed as comforting and protecting ('Mother Night protect us'). Hell is sort of like a Greek Hell, it's the place where you go when you're dead. Then you can either become demon-dead, living off consensually-given blood to mentor your descendants, or be released into the next world. & the male protagonists have names like Saetan & Daemon. If you're of the magic-using class, the Blood, your magic will be expressed through a jewel, & the darker it is, the more powerful your magic is.
While I loved the original Black Jewels trilogy, I haven't liked the recent Anne Bishop books, the Fae trilogy & the Ephemera duology. They haven't seemed to me to have the same depth in some way. I'm not sure whether this is character development or me liking the darkness reversal or what. But I read the first 2 1/2 chapters on Anne Bishop's website & really liked them, so I got the book (officially released today). I read it in one day. It's mainly a romance, about a girl with low self-confidence coming to power and a damaged man finding love, but there's definitely traumatic pasts & character development. (There's a slight cheat, since the young queen is considered unbeautiful by people in her world but is a thin redhead with probably adorable freckles.)
The main viewpoint characters are Theran, Cassidy, Gray, & Daemon. (Yes, Daemon & Jaenelle are back, & Saetan, & there are some nice scenes with Lucivar too.) At the end of the original trilogy, most of the Blood were killed off as tainted, meaning they'd cooperated with Dorothea's reign of oppression & torture & had hurt their men, their young women, & the landen (non-magic users) that they ruled. So the land of Dena Nahele has been devastated, by the loss of the ruling class, the following civil war, & several landen uprisings. The only queens who have survived are senile or underage, & are showing signs of having been corrupted by the old order anyway. So Theran, the leader of the winning faction of the civil war, goes to Kaeleer, the Shadow Realm (one of the 3 planes of existence, inhabited by humans & various magic-using nonhumans), to request a queen to rule Dena Nahele according to pre-Dorothea protocols. Cassidy the plain, the only queen lacking a court (hers resigned to follow a cute young thing), is chosen by vision & agrees to go to Dena Nahele for a year. Theran is kind of an ass, but loves his people, & wants to do what's best for them even if it hurts him. Gray, Theran's cousin, was sexually tortured for 2 years as an adolescent, & has retreated to being somewhat simple & has physical & emotional limitations on what he can do. Fate brings them together at the castle at the capital of Dena Nahele - Theran's ancestral home, site of rumoured hidden treasure, & the site of Gray's torture & they each grow over the course of the book as they interact with each other. As a side plot, Daemon & Saetan both deal with some of the trauma from their pasts, Daemon's hundreds of years of being a sex slave of Dorothea's & Saetan's having his children taken away from him. There is also a busybodyish talking dog.
The book was very enjoyable, & it was nice to see a somewhat unlikeable person as a viewpoint character who grows in the course of the book. It's a nice balance between having him be unlikeable enough to turn off readers & having him just be a nice person. When he's being most obnoxious, it's usually in someone else's viewpoint, which I think helps. Gray is also totally adorable. I wanted to help heal him & have him fall in love with me.
While I loved the original Black Jewels trilogy, I haven't liked the recent Anne Bishop books, the Fae trilogy & the Ephemera duology. They haven't seemed to me to have the same depth in some way. I'm not sure whether this is character development or me liking the darkness reversal or what. But I read the first 2 1/2 chapters on Anne Bishop's website & really liked them, so I got the book (officially released today). I read it in one day. It's mainly a romance, about a girl with low self-confidence coming to power and a damaged man finding love, but there's definitely traumatic pasts & character development. (There's a slight cheat, since the young queen is considered unbeautiful by people in her world but is a thin redhead with probably adorable freckles.)
The main viewpoint characters are Theran, Cassidy, Gray, & Daemon. (Yes, Daemon & Jaenelle are back, & Saetan, & there are some nice scenes with Lucivar too.) At the end of the original trilogy, most of the Blood were killed off as tainted, meaning they'd cooperated with Dorothea's reign of oppression & torture & had hurt their men, their young women, & the landen (non-magic users) that they ruled. So the land of Dena Nahele has been devastated, by the loss of the ruling class, the following civil war, & several landen uprisings. The only queens who have survived are senile or underage, & are showing signs of having been corrupted by the old order anyway. So Theran, the leader of the winning faction of the civil war, goes to Kaeleer, the Shadow Realm (one of the 3 planes of existence, inhabited by humans & various magic-using nonhumans), to request a queen to rule Dena Nahele according to pre-Dorothea protocols. Cassidy the plain, the only queen lacking a court (hers resigned to follow a cute young thing), is chosen by vision & agrees to go to Dena Nahele for a year. Theran is kind of an ass, but loves his people, & wants to do what's best for them even if it hurts him. Gray, Theran's cousin, was sexually tortured for 2 years as an adolescent, & has retreated to being somewhat simple & has physical & emotional limitations on what he can do. Fate brings them together at the castle at the capital of Dena Nahele - Theran's ancestral home, site of rumoured hidden treasure, & the site of Gray's torture & they each grow over the course of the book as they interact with each other. As a side plot, Daemon & Saetan both deal with some of the trauma from their pasts, Daemon's hundreds of years of being a sex slave of Dorothea's & Saetan's having his children taken away from him. There is also a busybodyish talking dog.
The book was very enjoyable, & it was nice to see a somewhat unlikeable person as a viewpoint character who grows in the course of the book. It's a nice balance between having him be unlikeable enough to turn off readers & having him just be a nice person. When he's being most obnoxious, it's usually in someone else's viewpoint, which I think helps. Gray is also totally adorable. I wanted to help heal him & have him fall in love with me.