HBIC Review of Queene of Light: Emily @ What Book is That?

Title: Queene of Light
Author: Jennifer Armintrout
Page Count: 375 pages
Publisher: Mira
Genre: paranormal romance
Copy for review was purchased by this writer

50 words or less: Ayla is half human, half faery, all assassin. Malachi is a death angel and proud of it. When Ayla accidentally mates a douchebag, steals Malachi's immortality, is falsely accused of murder, and becomes Queene, she has to somehow stay alive, rule her people, and fall in love. Easy, right?

I should have learned by now that whenever I start a new series, I have to have at least the first two books on hand, because the first book in the series suffers from having to birth the entire world and cast of characters and the second book is where I decide if I like the series or not. This in a nutshell is pretty much what happened to me while reading Queene of Light.

Queene of Light has all the right ingredients to be a really fun book. The setting is fantastic- just enough detail is provided of the various environments to make them vivid and easily imagined without bogging down the story or being too much of a distraction. There are characters who are extremely well-drawn- Keller and Cedric come to mind immediately. The history behind the current situation the characters find themselves in is interesting, although it doesn't get fully explored or explained- I found myself asking "okay, who cares" several times during first third or so of the book.

I guess the issue for me is that at the end of the book, I just didn't care or buy into Ayla and Malachi as individuals or as a couple. True, Ayla is a halfling in a world where that's heavily frowned upon and Malachi gets his immortality grappled out of him so they both find themselves in undesirable situations pretty quickly, but their relationship just didn't...flow...for me. I felt like the book was gearing up to be about something else and their relationship was thrown in as an afterthought.

I really think, though, that this is because this is the first book in a series. There was a ton of information to digest here. The cover blurb says "But even magic folk cannot dwell in harmony, and soon two Worlds emerge: the Lightworld, home to faeries, dragons and dwarves; and the Darkworld, where vampires, werewolves, angels and demons lurk," and all those groups definitely get mentioned throughout the course of the book with every indication present that they continue to play roles in the next two books. That's a lot of intrigue to explain in a relatively short amount of time.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this. Did this book knock my socks off? No. Is it possible that the next books in the series will accomplish that? Yes. The potential is definitely there. That it wasn't actualized in my opinion plays a role in my review of this book, but it won't necessarily keep me from reading the other books in the series. I will, however, probably get those books from the library.

Overall Grade: C
Blog With Bite rating: 2

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