So, I did mention I had more than one Martha Wells book to attend to today, and this is the tricker one to write about. I read Witch King earlier this year, and while I very much liked it, there were, I thought, some notable flaws. Witch King had a dual narrative, with each of the two branches separated by over fifty years. And within these fifty years, there have been some significant political changes that are sometimes a little hard to grasp because of how tightly we follow the protagonists.
So the question to ask is, have things become more clear in Queen Demon? The answer to that is: incrementally. I’ve decided that this loose focus on the middle must be deliberate on Wells part, and she’s revealing things piece by piece. We know the that the Hierarchs must have fell sometime during this period. We also know that our protagonist, Kai achieved the title of Witch King, and had someone very close to him die. But the veil has yet to have been drawn aside.
Each of the two narratives in Queen Demon follow the pair from the previous book. In the past, Kai and his companions are working on uniting disparate groups in order to fight the Hierarchs. The main campaign we follow here focuses on the dust witches; a mistrustful group who are ready to turn on just about anyone. Or even each other. How are they to convince such a group that the Hierarchs are the greater threat?
In the present, we are dealing with a world where the Hierarchs have fallen. But no one has ever found their homeland. Or their source of power. But there might be clues to the latter. Kai’s friend Zeide’s brother has become an academic in the intervening decades; specializing in these questions. And he’s starting to become even more twitchy and paranoid. What if someone stumbles on their lost power? Or worse, what if someone very deliberately uncovered it and uses it?
Again, just like the previous books, the world building here is top tier. The world is incredibly rich and well realized. But also not broadly explained; the reader needs to do the legwork here. But paired with the dual narratives, it can get a little bit exhausting; I started reading the book when it was first released and had to take a break and refresh my memory slightly with regards to Witch King, because I was so lost—and I had only read the first book earlier this year! There is no hand holding here.
But is it worth it? Hell yes. While I initially did not find the present narrative as compelling as the past, the last third of the book goes incredibly high octane. How high? I was up until 2am trying to finish it.
It’s also here at the end that the title Queen Demon may start to make sense… (If you have the ebook copy, try searching for how many times the world ‘queen’ appears. It’s a very opaque title.)
So while Queen Demon does have ‘middle book’ written all over it, it is also the more rewarding of the two books int he Rising World series so far.
For cbr17bingo, this is Migrant. The fact that demons can migrate from one body to the next is a point that should not be forgotten here.
And that’s a bingo on the top horizontal. And a diagonal I initially missed