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archersangelthis is a 4-book series that is a sequel to her The Seven Realms series (also 4 books)that i read several years ago. both series are YA fantasy.
i was reluctant to start these books because i was afraid i would not like them as much as the other books. i did like them, with some exceptions that i will get into in the spoiler section.
this series is set 25-30 years (there's a time jump) after the first books. there has been another war going on because a prince (now king) of another realm was mad that the woman who became queen in the last series had rejected him for marriage. he's had his brother killed to become king and has subjugated the other realms & he can't conqueror the queendom because it is 90% mountains and his army is really only good on flat land.
in the first series you could possibly handwave their ages and consider the main characters to be 20-22, but you can't do that in this series because they mention ages a lot. and it's Young Adult (which i rarely read), so all of the main, and most of the secondary, characters are teens.
the thing with the church that wanted to get rid of the wizards/mages & a cult within the church that wanted to drink their blood (for some reason) felt, not shoehorned in exactly, but added for filler.
especially when it got to the part where the head of the queendom's healer guild was possessed by the guy who started the cult & was working with the enemy king to destroy the family of the queen. the author could've just had him say that he was tired of seeing people die in the war as well as from hunger and that's why he did it.
the thing with the empress felt added on too. i don't know if it was an excuse to have a different kind of magic, or an excuse to have dragons. and that whole thing got wrapped up in an anticlimactic way.
and there were so many loose ends, or unexplained things. what happens to the queen's treacherous sister? what happens with the young woman who was a spy for her father, the queen's captain, & has started seeing the spirits of the previous queens? it seemed like there was a budding romance with the guy who makes amulets and stuff for the wizards, but it went nowhere. the dragons insisted on one woman character having armor, steal her jacket, knocked off some of their scales, bit holes in them & another woman sewed them onto her jacket. i though for sure that would be used for protection during a big, climatic fight, but no. it was a checkov's gun that wasn't fired.
there's more LGBT+ representation in these books in the first series (if that's what you're looking for in YA fantasy). in that one 2 very minor female characters are in a relationship. they get a brief mention in one of the these books, but in this series there are two young men that briefly spent time together & spend about 95% of the later books separated and yearning for each other.
there might be a transgender character too. the wizards/mages are referred to with he/him (it was the same in the first series too) but one is she/her. i probably should not speculate, if it's not what the author intended. but they are the only wizard/mage that i can recall being referred to with she/her.
i was reluctant to start these books because i was afraid i would not like them as much as the other books. i did like them, with some exceptions that i will get into in the spoiler section.
this series is set 25-30 years (there's a time jump) after the first books. there has been another war going on because a prince (now king) of another realm was mad that the woman who became queen in the last series had rejected him for marriage. he's had his brother killed to become king and has subjugated the other realms & he can't conqueror the queendom because it is 90% mountains and his army is really only good on flat land.
in the first series you could possibly handwave their ages and consider the main characters to be 20-22, but you can't do that in this series because they mention ages a lot. and it's Young Adult (which i rarely read), so all of the main, and most of the secondary, characters are teens.
the thing with the church that wanted to get rid of the wizards/mages & a cult within the church that wanted to drink their blood (for some reason) felt, not shoehorned in exactly, but added for filler.
especially when it got to the part where the head of the queendom's healer guild was possessed by the guy who started the cult & was working with the enemy king to destroy the family of the queen. the author could've just had him say that he was tired of seeing people die in the war as well as from hunger and that's why he did it.
the thing with the empress felt added on too. i don't know if it was an excuse to have a different kind of magic, or an excuse to have dragons. and that whole thing got wrapped up in an anticlimactic way.
and there were so many loose ends, or unexplained things. what happens to the queen's treacherous sister? what happens with the young woman who was a spy for her father, the queen's captain, & has started seeing the spirits of the previous queens? it seemed like there was a budding romance with the guy who makes amulets and stuff for the wizards, but it went nowhere. the dragons insisted on one woman character having armor, steal her jacket, knocked off some of their scales, bit holes in them & another woman sewed them onto her jacket. i though for sure that would be used for protection during a big, climatic fight, but no. it was a checkov's gun that wasn't fired.
there's more LGBT+ representation in these books in the first series (if that's what you're looking for in YA fantasy). in that one 2 very minor female characters are in a relationship. they get a brief mention in one of the these books, but in this series there are two young men that briefly spent time together & spend about 95% of the later books separated and yearning for each other.
there might be a transgender character too. the wizards/mages are referred to with he/him (it was the same in the first series too) but one is she/her. i probably should not speculate, if it's not what the author intended. but they are the only wizard/mage that i can recall being referred to with she/her.
