I was so pleasantly surprised by this! I loved the back and forth between characters and I only predicted one of the plot twists/reveals. It's the kind of book where every time you think you know what's going on it turns out to be completely wrong.

There are a lot of things to like about Four Dead Queens. Unfortunately, there are also things to dislike and sadly, I’m here to tell you that the popular observations about this book are true, and it’s a huge detriment to its overall enjoyability. I don’t regret reading Four Dead Queens – it surprised me sometimes, disappointed me other times, but was an interesting adventure overall.

I’ll start with the biggest thing, the thing all the reviews are talking about. Four Dead Queens is lacking in execution. It’s all over the place with six different POVs, messy pacing, and too many things it’s trying to accomplish. Either side of the story would have been sufficient in itself. I get how there are so many different perspectives to any event, but the reader doesn’t need to know so many of them. It muddles the plot. The story is not quite about Keralie, not quite about the Keralie/Varin love story, not quite about a coup, and not quite about Queen Marguerite’s big secret. Scholte seems to have struggled for balance between all these things – while it’s important to have subplots, all of these things are given similar weights in the story and fade in and out in importance at different times. It makes the book feel like it has four halfhearted plots instead of one strong central plot and three interesting subplots. In that way, it was difficult to be attentive for the first three-quarters of the story. Nothing was really moving.

On the other hand, Scholte had some interesting world building in Four Dead Queens. The idea of the quadrants mixes fantasy with science fiction and plays with a few favorite tropes to build something different than a lot of fantasy books coming out right now. The world building is stronger in the beginning, when the queens are not dead (I’m sorry, it’s not a spoiler if it’s in the title) – as the story progresses, it fades to focus on a single quadrant with a few nods to another. As such, Four Dead Queens left a lot of areas unexplored. Given the already scattered nature of the book, I understand that choice, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I would have liked to see more.

Eonia, on the other hand, is a bit overall sketchy. There are a lot of ableist views in the quadrant, the most blatant one being assigned “death dates”. This is the quadrants way of preserving resources – they kill citizens when they reach an age where they become a “burden to society”. This includes older citizens, but also people with disabilities. I don’t think I need to explain why that is extremely problematic. The view is challenged within the book, but not removed. Adding to this, there is rhetoric around life being fuller without a disability. There arena’s to this throughout the book as a cure is sought, but it plays in heaviest at the end when one character assures another they are looking for a way to remove the disability. This creates an extremely problematic precedent that those with disabilities not only have less value, but are somehow less than whole and cannot be happy. This is very much untrue – there are many paths to a happy ending.

I will give Scholte some points for tricking me and not following the path I expected for the first two thirds of the book. I was dead certain that events were going to go a certain way and characters’ secrets would be revealed and I was completely wrong. I’m still (as always) unimpressed with the love story, but character progression took a different path and I can respect that twist.

The end of the book tied up very nicely with a ribbon. It rushed through events at a pace I would have appreciated earlier in the novel. The lack of questioning about certain outlandish comments and overly convenient events annoyed me as a reader, but for someone swept up in the story, I don’t think they would have thought twice about it. The ending was too clean and easy and folks are way too accepting of certain things and it didn’t play believably to me at all.

Ultimately, Four Dead Queens was an interesting read, but I don’t think I would have picked it up if it hadn’t come in a book box such a long time ago.

I have mixed feelings about this book, but overall it was an enjoyable read with fascinating worldbuilding. I loved the shifting perspectives of the four queens, but had trouble caring about the main character, Keralie. She was pretty bland and most of her character development was flat-out stated in her internal monologue which came off really corny. And there wasn’t a physical description of her until 350 pages in…even though all the other characters had detailed descriptions. The love interest was dreamy but I wish the romance was developed more, it felt pretty rushed. Some of the plot twists were great and others I saw coming from a mile away. I loved how the author used the shifting perspectives to warp time and create more questions surrounding the mystery. An awesome debut novel, I would definitely be interested in Scholte’s future works!