After the ending of Blood of An Exile, I was eagerly anticipating the sequel, and Sorcery of a Queen did not disappoint! There is a lot going on and prophecies are being manipulated to come to fruition sooner than the characters hoped for. The world has expanded. Characters arcs are at their highest. The writing is detailed, descriptive and easily evokes vivid images of the various locations visited during the story. The dialogue between the characters is absolutely superb including emotion, dry humor, barbs being traded and it is lively with feeling. The ending is super dramatic and makes me eagerly anticipate the next book.
Full review to come on my YouTube channel.

Sorcery of a Queen is the second in the Dragons of Terra series, following the Flawless Bershad and Queen Ashlyn on their quest to save dragons, restore Ashlyn to the throne, and unlock the secrets of the sorcery she’s always accused of.

Sorcery of a Queen was such an excellent follow up to Blood of an Exile! I didn’t think it was possible to like a sequel more, but Naslund has done it. This was such a perfect combination of humour, adventure, and some really heartfelt moments.

The alternating chapters between different characters point of view really kept the story moving. Usually, there is a character that I’m a little less interested in then others, but Sorcery of a Queen managed to make me care and stay invested in everyone. While I found Vera’s chapters a little slower at first, by part two of the book I was as fully invested in her and Kira as I was with Bershad, and Ashlyn.

The humour of this book is absolutely spot on too. It’s a fine balance to write characters that are truly funny, but each character managed to have some really wonderful one-liners and some actual laugh out loud moments. They all have different humour too, which is so wonderful to see to create fully developed characters that each stand apart from each other. Ashlyn’s dry humour mixed with crude humour from Felgor and others, any reader will find a lot of this book hilarious no matter what your sense of humour is.

As I said too, there’s a lot of heartfelt moments. I didn’t really expect to cry reading Sorcery of a Queen, especially after all of the laughter, but I did. Several times. There’s a few spots that just punched me right in the heart, and I don’t think I’ll get over them any time soon. This really made the book what it was though - such a finely crafted balance of sad and funny pulled the book together, and it’s one you really can’t forget or get over.

Sorcery of a Queen is absolutely going to be one of my favourite reads of the year, and I strongly encourage everyone to pick up a copy of Blood of an Exile if you haven’t already, so that you can continue on to the even better sequel with Sorcery of a Queen.

More of a solid 4.5 but I’m rounding up.

I may be a little late with my review but these days, it’s become a norm. But believe me when I tell you that I jumped with joy when I received the ARC for this one because Blood of an Exile was one of my top favorites from last year and I couldn’t wait to see what was gonna happen next. And just as expected, the author didn’t disappoint me at all.

If there’s one thing that stays with you as you read this book is the breakneck pace - there’s just something happening every couple of pages and it doesn’t let up or give us breathing room. And it is so unpredictable that every twist shook me up and took me by surprise - but once it happened, I was left exclaiming that it was actually quite expected. And it is this pacing, relentlessness and surprising nature of the book that makes this a formidable sequel to its equally spectacular predecessor, also ensuring that it doesn’t have anything resembling a second book syndrome. We also get more world building, exploring new lands and ecosystems, and also getting to know the various experiments being conducted and their wide range implications for the people and creatures of these lands.

The characters are as interesting as ever, with more POVs added and while I can’t see how important some of them might be, I’m very sure the author has many plans for them in the future. I don’t wanna go into detail about every one of them, because that’ll lead to spoilers and I really want every reader to get to know these characters themselves. It’s such a diverse group too - from exiles trying to find their place in this world, some trying to understand more about themselves and their link to the dragons, one queen trying to save the empire by trying to think like a scientist while another just wants her agency and peace for all the people but is naive to the wiles of people she trusts, a bodyguard who just wants to protect her charge but has to let go of every other connection she has to the world to make it possible, and a young alchemist who just wanted to heal people but finds himself thrust into the middle of a war he didn’t ask for. And amidst all this is a cunning and devious mad scientist whose ideas and plans for the world are so extreme and far reaching, that I don’t think anyone within the story or we as readers have still grasped them as a whole. We might be intrigued about some of them, pity a few and hate some others - but I promise that any reader will get very easily invested in their lives because it’s impossible not to.

To conclude, this is a worthy sequel to the author’s wonderful debut and I was just so excited to be lost in the world of Terra. If you love your fantasy novels to be full of breakneck pacing, great group of characters, lots of twists and betrayals, a mix of science and environmental studies thrown in, alongwith a whole horde of majestic dragons - then this series is just perfect for you. It is highly engaging, dark at times but also with bits of humor, and lots of heart. It’s probably gonna be an year’s wait for the finale and I’m very excited for it, even though everything feels like a doomsday for my favorite characters.

The excellence of Sorcery of a Queen is honestly flabbergasting. Queen is the second book in The Dragons of Terra trilogy by Brian Naslund, and it’s a crime that as of writing this review there are only 10 ratings on goodreads. This book does, so, many, things right that it straight up blew my mind. It has incredible characters, exciting action, deep and original worldbuilding, a gripping plot, a compelling antagonist, great themes, excellent pacing, strong character growth, and a level of polish and inclusivity that made me positively vibrate with happiness. Sorcery of a Queen is easily one of my top books of 2020, Naslund positively killed it with his second novel.

If you are just hearing about this series for the first time and wondering why I am raving like a lunatic, may I kindly redirect you to my review of book one in the series: Blood of an Exile. Naslund’s first book was a 2019 gem that I missed and didn’t get to until January of this year. I refused to make the same mistake with his second installment. I can’t really go into many plot details without spoiling things, something I absolutely refuse to do. If you have read Blood of an Exile, Queen’s story picks up immediately after the end of book one and revolves primarily around the escalation in stakes, technology, and conflict caused by the first book finale. If you haven’t read Blood of an Exile, well you have made a mistake, and I again recommend you check out my review of book one. However, before you realize your error and dive into Exile, let me shout at you about its excellence.

The series follows a quartet of characters: A queen, an exile, a bodyguard, and a young alchemist. Each character has their own rich backstory and Naslund does a wonderful job giving each of them agency and distinction, while cleverly interweaving their stories. Sorcery of a Queen is an extremely powerful character story and has so much delicious character growth. The alchemist gets pulled into a conflict by chance, but ends up learning about himself and the world while working as a field medic. The queen, a master of politics and leadership, finds that she is actually a woman of action and there is a powerful joy in physically pushing humanity towards a better future. The bodyguard is a woman of honor and conviction, but her chosen path in life forces her to closely examine the value and worth of bonds and where she will draw the line. The exile is a man condemned to death, who learns he cannot die, who then learns he cannot escape death. The amount of change this rollercoaster of events unleashes on his personality and life outlook is a work of art and a truly original observation of the human condition. These are excellent characters.

In general, the overall quality of Queen has also improved. The prose is better, the action is punchier, and the humor is funnier. The pacing in Exile was good, but Queen’s is perfect. I absolutely flew through this book reading it in just two weekdays. The POVs all strike this great balance that constantly compels you to read more. The worldbuilding is also just bigger. The stakes of Exile were fairly small, with each of the characters having fairly simple and straightforward goals: stay alive, find a girl, get a job, research dragons. Towards the end of Exile, things began to escalate and it paved the way for Queen to grab a perfect narrative baton-pass and expand into a fully fleshed out world with bigger stakes. In particular, one thing I was enamored with was the evolution of themes. In Exile there was really one major theme, this idea of naturalism and that dragons were an important part of the ecosystem (and hunting them was destroying it). In Queen, this theme is still very present, but a number of additional themes like the cost of war, the nature of friendship, and the dangers of unchecked science all join it to build a much more luscious and juicy story. This enhancement of an already good story builds to something wonderful.

Sorcery of a Queen is fantastic, breaking every single one of my high expectations to tell a story that was nothing short of wonderful. Blood of an Exile had some good ideas and great characters, but Queen has it all. Usually, when I review a book I like to talk about if its best for readers who focus on characters, plot, worlds, or ideas. It is very rare that I come across a book that I can unilaterally recommend to all of those people, and this is one such occasion. I loved Sorcery of a Queen and I can’t wait to see where the series goes next.

Rating: Sorcery of a Queen - 10/10
-Andrew

Rating: 10/10

Thank you to Tor Books UK, Stephen and Jamie Lee Nardone for sending me an ARC of this wonderful book. All thoughts and opinions are mine only for this review.

Warning: This novel has the following: Experiments! Alchemy! Dragons! Airships! Assassinations, exploding cities, pirates, Felgor! Nasty little Vampire named Verdun, an ambitious lady called Kira and Vera, and the return of glorious young Jolan! Empires fight for incredible stakes, Lords and Dukes fight in epic scale battles, and everything goes haywire. The world literally goes into madness. It descends into a pit of hope, then chaos, hope, then chaos. This is what this wonderful book has to offer you, and guess what. The cover is so damn good! So damn good! Kudos to the cover designer. This is one of the best fantasy books I’ve read and all I have is praise. Well done Tor and Brian. You’ve delivered a hit series. Cannot wait for book 3.

Sorcery of a Queen. Sorcery of a Queen. Sorcery of a Queen indeed. This novel comes right at you like a flying kicka pow pow book and literally takes the dark side of fantasy, scrunches it all up, and then spits it. It takes the heroic side of fantasy and literally turns it up side down. Its like something pulled out of real life. And that’s not to meantion the fact that this all happens because of a certain weird individual – read on and you will discover a VERY sinister secret.

This is one of those novels that comes along in a while, and literally reminds me you of something. Wait. Is this a unique twist of both heroic fantasy and dark fantasy? Or is this something else? I feel like its the spiritual successor to Rachel Aaron’s The Legend of Eli Monpress Series. Except this is more like the realistic and grim version yet combined with hope. I’ve spent 3 days and I’ve breezed through this. I’ve really enjoyed reading this. One thing. I love the use of dragons in this book. Well written, well utilised, but can the Flawless Bershard now own an armada of dragons so Queen Ashe can use it? I think Flawless Bershard said he hated killing dragons in book 1 anyway. And in Book 3, he needs to literally kick the **** out of Verdun.

This is like the Deadpool of Fantasy. There. I’ve said it. It’s Deadpool. The writing is so good that the descriptions are bewildering, breath-taking almost. You’re in jungles, islands, airships, and a lot of climate change facts that are incredibly well written into the fantasy narrative. The dialogue is so refreshing its…I could compare this to Nicholas Eames Kings of the Wyld. Heck! This is very comparable to David Wragg’s the Black Hawks. I’d call this a new twist in fantasy. It’s like taking dark fantasy and heroic fantasy into a corner, and then…laughing at them. That’s what it feels like.

Tell me, what novel combines flying airships with humor? With such brutal gore in this world, one should be disgusted when you learn of Verdun. He’s a nasty little vampire. A very nasty vampire. And Castor is the reclutant servant. And quite frankly, I’ve loved all the characters that Jolan meets himself with. I felt sadness and sympathy, laughed and giggled at the same time. The humour is one of the best aspects. And I love Jolan’s innocence. The world needs more good natured people like him.

As for our flawless Bershard…he gets his ass getting handed to him all the time. I’m afraid to say, the man that’s literally killed Naga Soul Striders and Red Skulls…the world treats him brutally. There’s a new cast of characters that join us in this grand new adventure, and I must say, stop getting rid of characters I get attachted too Brian, they’re so good! *weeps weeps* Now if an author can do this in a novel and the reader feels something about it. Then he’s done the work.

This. This is pure fantasy. I did feel the ending was a little dragged on, and there were parts I would have wanted reduced. But I don’t want to spoil too much. All I know is that I’ve loved every character so far. And never, and never, and never, have I seen SUCH a mind-blowing twist. Empires ruined beyond all comprehension. (And this is the only CLUE I’m going to give. Read this novel and you’ll soon start to know what it means very very very very fast!) There is such a fantastic twist that it completely oblierates saving the world stuff and letting the world die – it produces something more unique than that.

Oh. And dear old Fergus! The man’s Jack Sparrow. I swear Jack Sparrow got drunk once upon a time, then stumbled upon his cousin named Fergus, and then they got lost, and then Fergus spent his time becoming mad and high, and well, I’d say the series is really about Fergus. Not Bershard. Also, Ashlyn needs more scenes. I def got a grand sense of her, but I want MORE of her. She’s a very good character, but she still needs to learn that the politics of lords and generals are too cunning – she’s a cunning character indeed. And Vera? Poor Vera. That’s all I can say.

All I can say is, this would be great as the following:

Netflix Series
Graphic Novel Series
Comic Series!
And thats it. That’s all I can say. IT’S THAT GOOOD. GO BUY IT NOW! YOU’RE MISSING OUT ON AN UNDER-RATED FANTASY GENRE AND AWESOME AND UNIQUE SUBPLOT.

Ok I’ve think I’ve rambled enough right now. This book and this series is for fans of Nicholas Eames and David Wragg.

Fergus! You take the stage!

Bugger.

Oh and bring on Book 3. Plz bring it. I need it!!!!!!!

I loved Blood of an Exile last year and Sorcery of a Queen equals and even exceeds it. Bershand and Ashlyn are striving to regain her throne. One of the big problems is that they are presumed dead in exile. This is fast paced and gritty, with plenty of Nasland’s trademark humour. Highly recommend this series.

There are no damsels here! I absolutely loved this book and the characters that filled the pages. You know right from the opening line you are in for something different, harder, full of rawr. I hadn't realized it was a part two, but that wasn't a problem as I was instantly pulled into the story and even though it had a good size cast, I wasn't confused.

I enjoy stories where the point of view switches, allowing for a broader exploration of the world and that was used here to great effect. The action was plenty, and brutal in the most delicious ways, keeping the sharp edges of the world honed. There was a dark edge to the way the characters interacted with each other that had a humor laced into it, not light, but fitting. Relationships were complex, romance wasn't a theme, but there was some in fitting with the tone. I adored Vera in every way. Loved the widows on the whole. Ironically, with all of the beautifully brutal action some of the most gruesome parts for me were in reading what Osyrus did. I'm curious what I missed by jumping into the world and look forward to heading back to part one.

If you want epic, action-packed fantasy with awesome heroes and a unique plot, this is one you don't want to miss.