Two Dark Reigns by Kendare Blake Book Review

Definitely one of the most mixed experiences I’ve ever had with a book series, I admire Kendare Blake’s Three Dark Crowns series as a whole, based on the three out of four books in the series I have read, but I also think you’d have to be a very patient and devoted reader to really appreciate what she’s doing.

This is the third book in the Three Dark Crowns series, that started with a tradition that had three sisters of different abilities, one to control nature, Arsinoe, one to control the elements, Mirabella, and one to be able to ingest poison, Katharine, and they each had to eventually duel for the role of queen of Fennbirn. I guess whichever one of them is mightiest on the battlefield is mightiest for the island. Well, Arsinoe and Mirabella ended up teaming up to escape an execution and secretly took a ferry to a different island surrounded by a mythical mist. Intending to start new lives and forget about the home they left behind, Arsinoe soon gets strange dreams involving an ancient fable, The Blue Queen. And the mist mentioned before? Something is happening to it that is killing off the people of Fennbirn right in plain sight. And there’s already a plot against the new Queen and winner of the duel, Katharine, who is having trouble ruling and falling into a dictator spell. With that, we have the next chapter of the series.

Back when I had the four-star rating system instead of the five-star rating system, I gave the first Three Dark Crowns only one star primarily because it was advertised as a Hunger Games-esque thriller against three sisters with different powers, and it was instead a giant boring prelude with almost nothing happening and too much character development getting in the way. Then I read One Dark Throne after hesitating for years and actually really liked it, rewarding it three stars out of four, and I think today that number would be three-and-a-half out of five. Anyway, One Dark Throne was written a lot like the first instalment but had the thrills I was looking for, and that made a big difference in me appreciating everything else the series was offering. Because the Three Dark Crowns series is admittedly written quite beautifully. You can really tell how everything looks, feels and smells like, and can imagine what it’s like to grow up in this generally hostile environment.

But with Two Dark Reigns, Blake ends up returning mostly to the slow pace of the first book, with a cluttered formula of various stories told at once, with too many of them feeling like they don’t matter much to the overall plot and too many with not enough thrills. We balance four different stories; Arsinoe’s strange dizzy spells and the stories within them about a past relative, Arsinoe and Mirabella living as unknowns in a brand new world, Katharine trying to reign over her new title and Jules plotting to cut that reign short. None of these stories sound particularly boring, and they shouldn’t be. But clumped together, they are too much, and too few punches thrown. By the time things start picking up, it’s not too long before they slow down again. Plus, it has an already enormous cast of characters with many new ones thrown in, and we often don’t care about the stories enough to want to really get to know them.

Blake revealed in her acknowledgments that she originally planned to finish the series with One Dark Throne, but the mass success of the series led her to continue, and I’m glad for her, as an author to an author. And if you have read and enjoyed both of the previous books in this series, you’ll probably like this one too. But too much in this series doesn’t work for me.