Young Adult Book Reviews

Genre:  Fantasy

# of Pages:  447

In the third installment of the Three Dark Crowns series, Katherine is struggling to maintain her newly crowned kingdom because the mist has begun acting strangely and she doesn’t know what it means.  Meanwhile, Arsinoe and Mirabella are on the mainland trying to find their place in a new world.  Arsinoe begins having nightmares about a Blue queen from the past and she thinks they are a message that she needs to return to the island.  Jules has found a group of people who believe her to be the rightful queen due to her powers and agrees to go along with their mission as long as it means that Katherine is overthrown.  She is still afraid of her powers, but knows she cannot hide from them forever.  She also knows she needs to make peace with what she is and not feel guilt or anger about it anymore.

The characters continue to development and it’s easy to see all of their viewpoints, which can be challenging with so many main characters.  The flashbacks to the Blue Queen help show how the story came to this critical point.  This installment carries on where the second one left off and will engage fans of the series, but it is a little disappointing that very little is really resolved during this book and instead more problems arise.  Readers will be looking forward to what I’m sure will be a very dramatic conclusion.