LGBTQIA+

I want to start with the things I liked about this book, beginning with the magic system. This review does contain spoilers so please read cautiously! Thank you to Netgalley and Macmillan for the ARC, which I received in exchange for an honest review.

I was talking to my roommate about how much we struggle with manga like My Hero Academia and Bleach (walk with me, I swear it’s relevant) because it seems that the creator’s solution for writing themselves into a corner is to give the protagonist a new skill out of nowhere that will somehow miraculously aid them in escaping their current circumstances. Aside from the classifications of magic, which were already interesting enough, the thing I liked the most about the magic system is how the skill tree is sort of built in, so there’s an in-world mechanism for leveling up existing skills through practice and circumstance–which in turn makes it much less jarring when those skills do develop! I also like that the magic school isn’t set up as some kind of egalitarian paradise, but rather that it’s acknowledged and wrestled with in the text that there’s privilege in being able to attend Paragon, and that not everyone has an equal shot at acceptance. 

This was such fun read and I loved it! 

The base premise of “what if grad school but for D&D classes” is absolutely delightful, and although I could absolutely see the Critical Role influence a mile away I thought this was such a fun and fresh interpretation! As an avid D&D player myself I am hugely in favor of stories set in that kind of universe, particularly if they have a new and modern twist, so this book was a perfect fit into that niche for me. 

I also really like the type of storytelling where you can tell that there’s something major in a character’s past, but the character themselves doesn’t reveal it until later on and mostly thinks about whatever it was in little glimpses—I find that much more realistic than a big info dump at the beginning of the story, because after a certain amount of time I think a lot of us don’t consider our traumas to be a narrative, rather we think about the bits and ways it affects our daily lives but don’t necessarily reflect on the whole. Getting to learn about Sebastian’s past in little bits, seeing how it impacts the development of his relationship with Elethior, and yet not really getting to put the entire picture together until the very end was a really interesting tactic and I felt that it paid off well here.

“You need to stop thinking of me as the boy you abandoned, and remember I’m the monster the Hierarchs feared.” GO OFF KING!!!!

Okay, but seriously–

First of all, re-read Witch King before you read Queen Demon. Yes, even if you think you don’t need to. It will help a lot. (Me, 45 pages in, suddenly remembering that what Kai knows as “horse” is definitely not the same as what I know as “horse.”)

This is one of those rare cases where I almost feel like the second book is better than the first, not because the first was weak at all–it remains a five-star read for me–but because in Queen Demon we really get to expand upon the world that was built in Witch King. I feel that Witch King really drops you into the middle of things without much explanation, which can make the first third or so of the book feel like you’re just trying to figure out what’s going on, e.g. what is an expositor? What is an intention? This was absolutely not a problem for me, I love high fantasy that doesn’t condescend to me in terms of explaining the mechanics of the world, but it does mean your reading brain needs to do quite a bit of limbering up before you really can sink your teeth into the world.

After spending quite a while trying to decide where to start with this one, I’m going to try to split this review up two ways, based on the style and the content.

Stylistically, I find the prose in this collection absolutely decadent. Vanessa Fogg is unbearably talented; her sentences are tight and often spare, but with every single verb and adjective seemingly chosen to be as incisive and exquisite as possible. Her stories full of fragmented sentences that help to buoy along a sense of otherworldliness in both the Closer and Farther sections of the collection. I also often felt that her choice of language was tailored closely to the setting of each story, so that at no point was there a sense of disconnect between the world and the words being used to describe it.

In theory, I love the story arc here. I love the idea of a socially subjugated person finding a way to access power that has only been made accessible to the dominant groups, I love the idea of love that manages to transcend these class/social boundaries, and like I wrote in my review of the last book, I love the magic system here which feels unique and interesting compared to other similar fae stories I’ve read before.

From my review of the first book: “Also, a lot of the “high” or “second world” fantasy I’ve read tends to set up bigotry between, like, orcs because they’re ✨️so warlike✨️ versus the other ✨️more civilized✨️ species, so it was kind of fresh for me at least that in this book it seemed to be set up between high fey vs. humans based on their access to certain types of magic, with the “good” and “bad” magic being defined less by the actual results and more by one queen who was so pissed at her boyfriend she made his existence illegal.”