Review: A Much Anticipated and Much Loved Sequel
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 11, 2014
I have been desperately waiting for the second instalment of this series since finishing the first book last year; the story of Zabeth, her ghost brother Eli and her father’s fallen kingdom was so brilliantly written and engaging that I could hardly put it down. One year on author Mary-Ellen Lang Collura brings the exiled princess back to life, now a teenager and still lost and hunted in a desolate post-apocalypse America/Canada 300 years after Something Bad ended the world.Genuinely creative and incredibly well thought out the world that Lang Collura presents to her readers is well developed and believable without being one of those fantastical landscapes that overloads you with description and explanation; I admit I was well armed with information from the previous instalment but I feel that even new readers will find this familiar yet strikingly different landscape easy to sink into.What truly makes the books however is the characters, Zabeth is a strong willed and independent young woman, yet the insights into her thoughts and motivations are so intimate and moving at times that we are reminded that she is still just a scared and anxious fifteen year old. The other characters she encounters, some familiar some not, are also well developed enough to be definable as individuals but remain unobtrusive enough to not distract attention from our heroine.The fantasy and mystery elements of the novel remain in perfect balance, the mythical world only complimented by the unusual circumstances and thrilling adventure subtext that walk alongside it. In short there is not a single thing that Lang Collura does not do well as a writer; she ticks all the boxes and promises readers a truly pleasurable experience.Having said all of this however I have to admit that I didn’t enjoy this book as much as the previous one, perhaps this is simply because of my own genuine excitement at reading the sequel – the anticipation could never be truly equalled in climax – or perhaps it is that some of the more impressive and innovative aspects of the first piece have lost their shine through familiarity; whatever it is I just wasn’t as blown away by the Queen’s Return as I was by the Queen’s Key. Despite this I still recommend the book highly, it is a great sequel to an even greater debut and I remain eager to read anything else that may come from the author.I struggled to decide whether to rate this book a 4 or a 5 and decided in the end to be generous, because I do believe that Collura has more great things to come in her future.