"It was only a joke. Of course I do not wish that. No one really wishes to be a queen."

I am very conflicted about this one. It took ages - and I stress ages - to finally get somewhere in the story. There are a few reasons for this but none of them make it easier to keep reading the story.

You have to push to get to half way - because it will get better. But even then, this story isn't great. It's a lot to slog through 3 POV. The world building is pretty scant - enough that I still don't think this all makes sense. And the reasoning behind the queens and the priestesses plan seems silly - I mean, how did no one come up with the same plan at any point.

And couldn't ONE girl throw the whole thing off if she just decided to get pregnant before the ritual thing? What do they do if one of them suddenly has the next heir? Or possibly triplets?

But, as always with this author, the characters were interesting and the plot and end was enough that I plan to read book 2. But you should know going into this one that NOTHING Is decided by the end I wish I'd known. ( )

While a friend was staying with me recently, she picked ‘Three Dark Crowns’ off my library book pile and stayed up all night reading the whole thing. This is a definite hazard of visiting my home. Once I started the book myself, I could see what she meant and read it all in an evening. It’s a very readable, escapist fantasy world in which nearly all the main characters are women. The few male main characters are mostly love interests, which is in itself delightfully escapist. Although the central conceit sounded fanciful to the point of ridicule in the blurb, it actually worked very well. Triplet sisters are born every generation and must battle to become sole ruler, until they give birth to triplets in turn and must go into exile. What elevates this premise is that fact that vested interests and politics have developed around such an odd tradition. Fantasy worlds must always convince you of why the status quo exists. Or why it’s collapsing, as in [b:The Fifth Season|19161852|The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)|N.K. Jemisin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386803701s/19161852.jpg|26115977]. Blake shows how the aristocracy and religious elite surrounding the triplets keep the bizarre rituals in place, as well as deftly acknowledging the world beyond this strange island. It’s good to know that the place is considered eccentric! Magic appears to be a matter of prestige, underlying the vaguely feudal class system, rather than having a great deal of practical use. Applied or ‘low’ magic is seen as suspect. This certainly isn’t one of those fantasy worlds where magic is a substitute for electricity, oil, and computers.

At the end of the book, I found myself very invested in where the story goes. I’ve been reading more fantasy than usual recently, despite preferring sci-fi for many years. Perhaps I’ve finally found some good fantasy recommendations? I think it’s also about escapism, and possibly because I've always loved weirdness in my fiction. Am I wrong in suspecting that sci-fi isn’t as weird as it used to be? Perhaps because it’s been overtaken by an understandable pessimistic and dystopian tendency? Far-future post-scarcity strangeness feels like a phenomenon of 20th century sci-fi. (I’m speculating from a limited sample size here, obviously, and haven’t done actual research.) Anyway, the point is that I found ‘Three Dark Crowns’ distinctively strange. The poison magic was especially peculiar: training one of the queens to resist poisons, despite the fact that they’re her weapon and her sisters wouldn’t ever try to poison her. Thus I found Katherine the most interesting sister, although all three were intriguing. The least appealing elements of the narrative were the romances, as the characters are basically all sixteen years old. Teenage romance isn’t of great interest to me, although Katherine and Arsinoe’s pragmatic attitudes were nicely done. Whichever queen survives the fight to the death would obviously have to make a political marriage.

As I’m definitely going to hunt down the sequel in the library, might as well speculate about what I’d like to find in it. I’m really hoping the mother of the triplets shows up, perhaps returning from exile to explain why she told two of her daughters that they had the wrong magical gift. Also, I’m very pleased by the possibility of the sisters teaming up to tear down the system that pits them against each other for no reason. I wouldn’t expect the first book to fully embrace that possibility, but it laid the groundwork for this to happen later. I would also welcome more descriptions of outfits and fewer of poisonings. ( )

*rec'd by Claudia Morcate-Martin as "hunger games but with triplets

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Its a pretty quick and easy read. It's nothing that's blowing me away, but I'm definitely enjoying reading it and finding that I can't anticipate what will happen as I usually do, which is a delight. I also love some of the dark ironies in the book's plot, and am morbidly fascinated with what will go wrong for each girl next. The writing also just has some interesting moments in a linguistic sense, when I just pause to re-read a sentence and enjoy the way it sounds or how it is written. The characters have an impressive amount of depth for having to split the book between three of them with rotating perspective chapters.

A fantasy YA book that I can't predict is a dream! Immediately starting the second book---so you know it's good. ( )

I think it's best going into this book not knowing much at all. I had kind of the same issue with this one as I did with Heartless. There's one main event that I was looking forward to and seeing what happens but of course that doesn't happen till the end and so until we got to that part, I felt things moved a little slow. It was a lot of build up, which I understand why but I just really wanted to get to the main event. The one downside was there were a lot of characters in here and it sometimes got confusing trying to keep straight who is on whose side and their relationship with each other. There was a twist at the end that I didn't expect and I loved it. I really enjoyed the ending and the surprises, can't wait to get to the next book. ( )