I won a copy of this book from a giveaway Kacen did on their twitter. I had just had the honor of meeting them at LeakyCon and then won and was very excited.
It is book 1 of a series, I am not sure of how many. I had read This Is Kind of an Epic Love Story and really enjoyed it and was excited to read this story. It sounded fascinating. I think though I did it a disservice. I read it after I finished The Raven Cycle and while Call Down The Hawk was sitting on my TBR cart and I was feeling the pull to it because of how much I ended up loving the characters and story. So part of me was destined to be in a hurry and anxious to get to it and so I think that is why I had a hard time feeling totally invested here. It took a but but I did get into the story. It is interesting world building. Queen of the Conquered takes place in a nation that has slaves, plantains, and magic called kraft here. The white skin and blonde hair and blue eyes is the valued look among the ruling class. This group not only feels like they are ordained to own others, the brown and black members of their world, but that kraft is their right only and that if someone of color has it they stole it. As in the slave society that we know form our shameful history, slaves here are not supposed to read, and even those people of color who have freedom are aware they can be enslaved at any time and that they have less freedoms than the colonizers.
Sigourney lives in this world and she is the only survivor after her family is massacred. They have been killed because of the power the family had managed to amass. She wants revenge. But she isn't the only one. She is loathed by her people, the people of this island nation because she hasn't freed her slaves. She says she can't until she is the ruler and then she will free everyone but she needs them until she has control, to help her take this power from the colonizers. The questions of does the ends justify the means, would she really free them once she has the power she is after or will she be corrupted by it, is she already corrupted, who killed her family, what is really happening on the island, and what is the deal with this odd king of their are all part of what book 1 tackles.
The world building is interesting and I was a bit surprised by the ending. I think I would have loved this more had I help off a little longer and read Call Down The Hawk, I would have then been ready (well not ready but forced ) to move on while waiting for the next book in that series. Also, I started reading this just around Thanksgiving and there was so much time I couldn't be reading between cooking and working (retail) Black Friday Weekend that it was hard to get into a grove with long blocks of time for reading.
This is also quite different from Kacen's other book which was a YA and a romance.
(Finished December 3, 2019)
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