The Born Queen by Greg Keyes is the fourth, and final, novel in The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series. The previous books are titled; The Briar King, The Charnel Prince, and The Blood Knight. I had been looking forward tot his book for quite awhile, especially since I really enjoyed the first three books quite a bit. Here are my thoughts on this particular novel.

The plot of this book picks up where book three (The Blood Knight) left off. There are several different storylines going on within this book such as; Anne’s rise to power, Aspar’s need to protect the King’s Forest, and Cazio’s story. There are also a couple subplots sprinkled in as well. On the surface this book has a good premise and seems to be outlined well. However, the execution of the book was poor. In fact, there were a couple times during this novel that I felt as though Mr. Keyes did not write this, because it seems so different than his previous novels. The general plot line comes across as jumbled and haphazard. The actual pacing of the novel felt like driving a car that has a bad transmission, fast, slow, fast, dead, slow, repeat. It was very difficult to get into a grove while reading this due to the pacing and unevenness of the flow. The story’s progression is also odd in several places. It seems as though all the build-up in the first three novels, setting up plot points, etc, was simply thrown out the window and new ideas and incomplete scenes are put in there place. In the end I was left feeling disappointed and frustrated over the fact that I spent three books getting to this point only to be left in confusion as to how the plot came to be this way. This book does offer an end to the story, but it is done in such a rapid fashion that there is, again, little satisfaction at finishing the story.

The characters in this novel are relatively the same cast as from the previous books, Aaspar, Neil, Mery, Anne, Robert, Cazio, etc. Much like the plot from the first three book, I enjoyed most of these characters in the previous book – particularly Cazio. Yet, in this novel (aside from Cazio) most of the characters felt alien to me. Very few of the characters felt much like they did in the previous three books. The dialogue of a couple characters is very different from how they talked previously. Characters made choices and decisions that they would have never made before, and almost all character development done in the first three books was thrown out the window. I fully understand that some characters were intended to go through dramatic transformations during this series, however, as a reader I still expect those transformations to be logical not just thrown out there to try and liven up the story. Aside from Cazio, I was never able to connect to any of the characters in this novel. This was especially disappointing because I enjoyed these characters so much prior to this book.

A few criticisms about this novel:

1 – The lack of continuity from the first three books to this book. Characters, plot, pacing, etc. I don’t think it is too much to expect that in a series of four books, all the books have the same feel to them. That is simply not the case with this book.

2 – The pacing of this novel. I don’t know if Mr. Keyes was trying something new with this book or just what happened, but the overall flow of this book made it near impossible to read evenly for a long period of time. Normally I read a book this size in 3-4 days. This one took me almost ten days.

3 – In a four book series the author has time to set things up, and plan things out. The ending of this book felt extremely rush and thrown together. I enjoy books where the ending isn’t something that I expected, yet with this ending it seems that Mr. Keyes did things ‘just because’. It left me feeling cheated and disappointed.

A couple positives about this novel:

1 – Cazio. He is one of the few bright spots of this book. A character with a natural appeal and witty dialogue. I quickly began to look forward to his sections, if for no better reason than I cared about what happened to him.

2 – Solid world building. This is a very solid ‘real’ world where environment makes sense and has a logical progression.

This book simply does not match up to the previous books, even a little. As I said before, I was a big fan of the previous books, but if this book had been the one to start the series I don’t think I would have read beyond this book. There are some positives here, but I think the negatives far outweigh anything that resembles a positive. I really don’t know precisely what went wrong, if the book was rushed to publication, or what, but I do know that my experience with this book was not a positive one. I have long been recommending the Briar King to readers; however with this book I am not sure I can do that any longer. If I do, I will be warning them that the first three books are very good and the fourth one falls well short. I really wanted to like this book, but in the end, I just could not. I was expecting so much more from this book.