Somewhere in the world, there is someone who will bake you cookies and buy you swords and fight your dragons. Never give up.
This continues to be an enjoyable series; I’m sorry it has only one more book to go. It starts out with Kianthe and Reyna deciding to multitask; if they’re getting married, why not add overthrowing Queen Tiliane, Reyna’s former boss, into the mix? Sure, their baby dragons are hatched and causing chaos in Tawney, Kianthe’s uptight parents who she hasn’t spoken to in years have invited themselves to the wedding (along with the man they’d rather she marry), and there’s no guarantee the person they want to replace Tiliane on the throne with even wants the job, but why should any of that stop them? When you’re planning the wedding of your wifetime, who has time to worry if you’re going to live long enough to say “I do”?
Kudos to Thorne for a varied spectrum of gender and sexuality identities. Will knock off two points for continued use of the word “boobs” (in my opinion there are only four times that word is acceptable: a Rachel Bloom song, a The Little Mermaid meme, a Wanda Sykes song, and the Honest Trailer for The Avengers). Ending on a cliffhanger was certainly an attention-grabbing way to build up hype for the last book, not that I think this series honestly needs any hype; fans will pick up the next book, cliffhanger or not. The decision over what to do with Tiliane and the monarchy was interesting. I faintly remember this not being the only book series to have a Spymaster named “Locke” in it, I just can’t remember where else I’ve read it. Wanted to ask Reyna what exactly had been her plan to get out from under Tiliane’s thumb if the plan outlined in this book caused her such anxiety. Also a little out of the blue was Reyna’s religious crisis; which may I add, seems to go from rigorous devotion to doubt to changing her religious beliefs in the course of maybe 10 days (and 310 pages). I love the introduction of the “problematic” parents and childhood friend/parents’ desired partner of Kianthe, and then they turned out to be not the least bit problematic, any of them. The Captain Dreggs continues to be an absolutely strange delight; that is a character that needs to be used sparingly lest they take over the entire plot. The one request I have is that the next book must include drawings of Ponder, Visk, Pill Bug and Gold Coin; the illustration of Kianthe and Reyna on Visk included in this book was just not enough. I’m glad that Kianthe’s and Reyna’s utter lacksidasicalness and indifference to their actual wedding was explained by book’s end, because I spent a chunk of the book thinking, “Ladies, you do know you can just live together engaged, right? No one is going to stone you if you just decide not to get married.”
I had just one questions: Is Cocoa & Capitalism supposed to be Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, some other game I’m not thinking of, or is it just completely an invention of Thorne’s?