Review: HER MAJESTY'S ROYAL COVEN by Juno Dawson

 

Her Majesty's Royal Coven by Juno Dawson

A Discovery of Witches meets The Craft in this the first installment of this epic fantasy trilogy about a group of childhood friends who are also witches.

If you look hard enough at old photographs, we're there in the background: healers in the trenches; Suffragettes; Bletchley Park oracles; land girls and resistance fighters. Why is it we help in times of crisis? We have a gift. We are stronger than Mundanes, plain and simple.

At the dawn of their adolescence, on the eve of the summer solstice, four young girls--Helena, Leonie, Niamh and Elle--took the oath to join Her Majesty's Royal Coven, established by Queen Elizabeth I as a covert government department. Now, decades later, the witch community is still reeling from a civil war and Helena is now the reigning High Priestess of the organization. Yet Helena is the only one of her friend group still enmeshed in the stale bureaucracy of HMRC. Elle is trying to pretend she's a normal housewife, and Niamh has become a country vet, using her powers to heal sick animals. In what Helena perceives as the deepest betrayal, Leonie has defected to start her own more inclusive and intersectional coven, Diaspora. And now Helena has a bigger problem. A young warlock of extraordinary capabilities has been captured by authorities and seems to threaten the very existence of HMRC. With conflicting beliefs over the best course of action, the four friends must decide where their loyalties lie: with preserving tradition, or doing what is right.

Juno Dawson explores gender and the corrupting nature of power in a delightful and provocative story of magic and matriarchy, friendship and feminism. Dealing with all the aspects of contemporary womanhood, as well as being phenomenally powerful witches, Niamh, Helena, Leonie and Elle may have grown apart but they will always be bound by the sisterhood of the coven.

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At the moment, this is a DNF for me. I really wanted to love this book, and don't get me wrong, for the right reader, this would be a great book. I adore all of Juno's other books, but this is more of a personal issue taste for me, because I've found I just don't really like adult stories about witches covens and the politics among them. I couldn't get through A Discovery of Witches for the same reason, but I read more of this one than that. And yes, I knew going into this book that this was going to be about covens. I felt compelled to try it because of loving the author's other books, but I just couldn't get on with it. Having said that, this book is very well written and I was impressed with how modern it felt, blending traditional coven life with modern life/technology. This worldbuilding was phenomenal, and when I next update my class reading list when I'm teaching worldbuilding, I will be including this.

The characterisation was also fantastic and I loved that it was multiple POV third-person. Normally, if I get a book where I'm not sure I'll like it because it's about covens, I only manage to read a chapter or so, but I read about six of this one, which is testament to how strong it is.

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Review: Shattered by C. Lee McKenzie

Shattered, A Story of Betrayal and Courage by C. Lee McKenzie
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Courage put Libby Brown into the final selection for the Olympics, but betrayal crushed her spine and her chance at the Gold. Now she has two choices, use her courage to put her life back together, or remain shattered forever.

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Unfortunately this is a DNF at 19% for me. I had high hopes for this book, thinking it would be similar to Scars Like Wings by Erin Stewart and Faceless by Alyssa Sheinmel. As a disabled person myself, I’m always looking for stories of disability that are skilfully and sensitively told. Unfortunately, this wasn’t one of those for me.

Within a few chapters, I’d picked up on quite a few ableist sentences. When Libby becomes paralysed following a skiing accident, she tells readers, ‘I might as well be dead if I couldn’t walk or ski or do anything that I loved. I couldn’t imagine how it would be to be trapped in a wheelchair the rest of my life, and I willed that image to disappear.’ This immediately set off alarm bells for me as I’ve had so many people devalue my own life since becoming disabled, people telling me that they’d rather be dead than live as I do. I really didn’t like the idea of being ‘trapped’ in a wheelchair given that wheelchairs offer freedom to so many disabled people that they wouldn’t ordinarily have. Still, I persevered with this book. I thought maybe this was just Libby’s mindset at the start of her journey as she was still coping with her new reality. I was hoping to see a transformation in her mindset and her acknowledging that her earlier thoughts were harmful and ableist.

I don’t know if this does happen, as I stopped reading at chapter nine. The above quotes were around chapter three, but by chapter nine we had more ableism and I simply wasn’t enjoying the story. Reading was feeling like a chore. Another instance of ableism I picked out was this one, which Libby uses when ‘evaluating’ her new room mate at the rehab centre: ‘More to the point, how could a one-legged swimmer have three boyfriends and the attitude of the Dali Lama?’ Just, urgh. She uses the term ‘one-legged’ in a clearly negative way here and she’s just so judgemental of her new ‘friend’, only seeing the disability.

Leading on from that, I didn’t find Libby likeable, yet I also felt like I didn’t know her. There wasn’t a great deal of deep characterisation for her or any of the characters, in my opinion. And the writing was kind of clunky. The very first paragraph tells us about a girl, Etta, who wasn’t then in any of the first nine chapters again. There’s no mention of a first-person narrator in that paragraph, so I assumed at first that Etta was the main character and that it was a third-person narrative. That seemed like a really poor opening to me.

There was a lot of repetition of phrasing too. We’re constantly told that voices interrupt Libby’s thoughts when she’s in hospital, and so many chapters began in similar ways. For my day job, I work as a developmental editor for a publisher and I’m a writing teacher, and there were just so many little things like this that I would’ve flagged if I’d been editing it. These things just meant I couldn’t get into the story to enjoy it.

And there were some big pacing issues—the characters constantly refer to important things that have happened off-page that the reader doesn’t actually witness. One major example of this is how suddenly were told Libby has a boyfriend when she’s at the rehab centre and sees her roommate with hers. I didn’t spot any mention of Libby having a boyfriend prior to this, but then we’re told that all this time the boyfriend had been trying to get in contact with her. That seemed like an afterthought and I couldn’t work out why this hadn’t been incorporated more smoothly into the narrative earlier on.

And then Libby and her boyfriend break up. Take a look at this passage:

“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “I asked you here to tell you that since things are so, well, different” —I held onto the arms of the wheelchair like a lifesaver— “I’ll understand if you have to move on. Your degree. Your life. You know.” I had to stop so my voice didn’t catch. “Hey, but thanks for coming by.”
For the first time our eyes connected.
“I’m sticking if you want me to.” Now his voice sounded pinched, maybe panicked. He’s afraid I’ll take him up on his offer. It wasn’t so much how he’d said those words as it was the way he sat pulled away from me, ready to bolt for the door that made me flinch.
I shook my head. “No.” The word came out sharp and final. “I don’t think that’s necessary.”
[…]
“I’m really sorry—”
And that’s all you can come up with? Sorry was such a limp word.
I shook my head. “Not your fault. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if Ben had pulled himself out of bed that morning and gone with me. He might have taken the hit instead of me. He might have heard the snowboarder coming at us and shoved me out of the way.
“I know, but I, well I’m just—”
“Don’t be.” I did not want to hear the word sorry from him. I hadn’t expected our meeting to go this way. I’d expected him to protest more. I hadn’t expected my heart to shrink when he turned his back and vanished out the door.

This was the point that really got to me, Like, I understood Libby’s feelings. I’d felt that before, being convinced no one would want me for my disability—but I wanted either him to fight for her here or for her to just be angry or something. Instead, she’s just accepting of it. I don’t know if we get more on this later, if I’m fact Libby does realise she still has worth. But this, combined with the earlier ableism and the pacing issues, just meant I couldn’t read any further.

In fact, the only thing that had kept me reading that far was the mystery element, that we know that the ski accident wasn’t an accident. Someone had paid a guy to cause the accident. I loved that, but it just wasn’t enough to keep me reading.

I feel bad giving this book one star, but it read like an unedited draft to me and the ableism was a big problem.

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Review: THAT NIGHT by Cecily Wolfe

 

That Night by Cecily Wolfe
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Drug overdoses don't happen to girls with good grades and athletic talent, with longtime friends and a devoted boyfriend. Or do they?

When high school seniors Cassidy and Sarah, along with Kayla's boyfriend Paul, discover their best friend Kayla unconscious at a party, the idea that they have lost her to a heroin overdose is unbelievable. She didn't use drugs, except the pain medicine prescribed for a soccer injury, and she had no reason to accept any from a stranger. The month that follows her death is filled with anxiety, sadness, frustration, and questions. Answers won't bring Kayla back, however, so as Cass and Sarah struggle with the insensitive but predictable behavior of parents, classmates, and teachers, Paul falls into a depression that leads him down a dangerous path. With Kayla's younger sister Mia in mind, the three of them work towards forging ahead without the girl who has held them together since elementary school.

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This is an important story to tell--about how it's not just drug addicts who end up dying due to overdoses--but for me, it just didn't engage me in the way that I'd hoped. It ended up being a DNF about listening to about half of the audiobook. Although the writing was good at times, I found it a bit flat, a little repetitive, and it just didn't really hold my attention. I think this is just a personal preference kind of thing though as I was expecting a more engaging story.

However, I did find the alternating points of view a little disorientating as we seemed to flit from one POV character to the next, often in the same paragraph, and I kept getting a bit lost and never quite knowing who the POV character in any given scene was because of this headhopping.

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Review: Jane: A Retelling by Lark Watson

Jane: A Retelling by Lark Watson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Unfortunately this is a DNF for me at 10%. I am just not sure what to make of this book... On the one hand, this is described as a gothic romance retelling of Jane Eyre, and I love Jane Eyre retellings and anything gothic. But this book just didn’t do it for me. It felt flat, there was little characterisation for anyone other than the MC, and it lacked the atmospheric imagery typically found in gothic novels.

The pacing at the start seemed off to me—there’s a lot of exposition for Jane’s background in the very first chapter, which does build her character well, but it just seems too much in one go, particularly as every moment of her interview is given to us, yet in the chapters that follow we’ve got whole months passing in a page. This really disrupted the rhythm, and I’d have appreciated it a bit more if we were given more time with Jane as she settles into her new job, so we can see what it’s like, rather than just being told what happens over the course of a month. (I did love the how Jane clashed with the interviewer though, but in a quiet way.)

Linked into this, I also found there was lots of telling and not much showing. Jane’s being employed as a nanny, yet when she meets Adelia and begins nannying, we aren’t given anything to tell us about the girl from Jane’s POV, her impressions of her, or any descriptions really. Whole days pass in a single paragraph, and a page later and a whole month has passed and we know little about five-year-old Adelia or Jane’s relationship with her. What we do know about the girl is told rather than shown, such as: “But, I realized nothing would save me if I didn’t have a gift in hand as Adelia was a very materialistic girl” and it was the first time I began to get a sense of who the little girl was/what her personality is—but it didn’t grab me as the writing just seemed flat and I would’ve liked to have seen examples that proved Adelia was materialistic rather than being told it. Things like this should’ve been integrated into the story more, and I’m afraid I just didn’t connect as there’s very little about Adelia’s personality.

Instead, the language used to describe Adelia at times “others” her. Before we even meet Adelia (and in fact, we don’t get to witness an introduction with the girl) another character calls her “odd” as she doesn’t speak English. This isn’t called out by the protagonist—not even internally, which first person narrative allows for—and is just left to pass as a normal comment which in itself is problematic. It places her nationality as inferior to the other characters’ nationalities, and almost suggests the only thing worth noting as she is introduced is her otherness. There’s nothing about her personality at this point—which could’ve easily been slipped in if we’d been given a scene where the two meet.

Yet even this portrayal of Adelia as Other is not consistent, as we are given her dialogue in English and there’s very little, if anything, about her Spanish culture, except for that she’s “odd”. The protagonist is supposed to also be conversing with Adelia in Spanish, but I just didn’t believe it. Coming from a household where one of my parents would regularly speak Spanish and I knew it growing up, we’d have little Spanish phrases we’d all use (even slipping them into conversations that were otherwise spoken in English) and it would’ve been nice to see something similar as it would’ve just made it more believable—and it would’ve *shown* a bit more, which there was very little of.

By the time we get to where the gothic tropes come into play—Jane seeing a person in a window of a house that she’s told is empty—I’d unfortunately lost interest. It also didn’t help that even these scenes were basically told to readers with the exception of one or two nice images. The author could’ve really made these into atmospheric moments with lots of evocative imagery and gothic language, and I was disappointed to find this wasn’t the case.

I’m also under the impression this is a romance, but 10% into the story, and we don’t seem to have met the love interest. To me, this is another pacing issue.

So at the moment this is a DNF for me. Unfortunately, it’s just not my cup of tea.


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