I don't read much witch fiction, but this was pretty good. It was an interesting premise and had a few twists. There's also some good trans representation and discussion.

Her Majesty's Royal Coven is an urban fantasy book which I absolutely adored! The story itself, the characters , everything so well developed ! I love the idea of Queen Elizabeth years ago gathering witches to form a royal coven. There are a lot of social issues addressed ! It’s unique and omg what a ride! Definitely a book you should add on your tbr!

Her Majesty’s Royal Coven may not be publicly acknowledged by the government, but everyone knows that the gifts witches have can benefit mundanes, as long as they don’t scare them too much in the process.

The book starts when the girls are just friends, scared of growing up, and more than a little nervous to soon join Her Majesty’s Royal Coven (HMRC). They’re the offspring of witches who are already members, and really don’t know any other path, but they do know it’s a lot of responsibility too.

The story then moves on to adulthood. While some of the original witches have chosen not to stay with HMRC, there has been a major war of the witchy variety. While the mundanes (non-witches) may have noticed a bit of it, most of the fighting and losses involved the witches.

Overall, the characters were unique, memorable, and believable (at least if you love magical realism). I gave this book 4 out of 5 stars and can’t wait for the next book in the trilogy. The end was a fantastic cliffhanger and I need to know what happens next!

The author captivated my interest from just the description alone, I was invested in the story from start to finish and I can not wait for the other books in the series to be released.

A moving and engaging look at the way fear and hatred can destroy even the strongest foundation, and the way power corrupts even the most well-meaning. Five girls are introduced on the eve of taking an oath to use their magic to protect their country. Decades later, after a witch civil war, Elle is a housewife wanting nothing to do with magic, Leonnie is the founder of a breakaway coven for witches of color, Niamh is a vet using her powers to help animals, Helena is the head of Her Majesty's Royal Coven, powerful and important - and Ciara is in a coma, put there in the aftermath of the war. A child with unusually strong powers brings the women back together, with devastating consequences. A very British book, the current struggle between the white, straight, cis power structure and the people who just want to live as themselves is reflected in the story. TERF Helena is willing to destroy the world to make it conform to her ideals, while Leonnie is too willing to walk away from the problems of the coven because she feels disempowered and unable to make change. A great read!

Thank you Penguin Books and NetGalley for the advanced electronic review copy of this book. I really wanted to like this book and was expecting so much from it, but was left underwhelmed. The writing felt underdeveloped, the first half of the book felt very drawn out (perhaps due to setting up the world-building and plot for what is to come in the following volumes of the trilogy), and I was struggling to feel connected to the characters.

Her Majesty’s Royal Coven was established by Queen Elizabeth I to protect her. Now, centuries later, Helena is the High Priestess, leader of the coven. Her friends are: Niamh, a vet who uses her powers to heal animals, Elle, a housewife leading a secret life as a witch, and Leona, who left to create her own intersectional coven. After Helena discovers a young warlock with extraordinary powers they’ve never seen before, she brings him to be trained and examined by Niamh. However, the warlock holds a lot of secrets which threaten to turn the coven upside down.

As soon as I saw this title I knew I needed to read this book, but I went into the story without knowing what it was about. It was a fantastic witchy story that we need right now.

This story explores gender and gender stereotypes. This witch world was divided into female witches and male warlocks with nothing in between. However, when a transgender character entered the novel, it threw some of them off. There was a lot of transphobia which was disturbing to read, but that’s the point. The real world and fictional fantasy worlds have not been nice to transgender people, especially in recent years. This intersectional look at witches was such an important and powerful read.

The final few chapters of this book were completely shocking and unpredictable. I can’t wait to see what happens in the next book.

Thank you Penguin Books for sending me a copy of this book.

Really enjoyed this fresh take on witches in our contemporary world. There were definitely some big twists and I appreciated how cinematic the writing was - I could see everything happening!

Though the premise of Her Majesty's Royal Coven has great appeal to a lover of witchy novels with a hint of spycraft, I found the writing of the characters quite dull and strained to even get 15% into the story. This boredom was not helped by the lack of a clear objective within the plot at this point in the story, thus I did not finish this novel.

hmmm i dont know... i don't remember why i requested this arc lmao. but thank you for it! the plot was interesting, but ultimately i couldn't get into the story? not too sure why. i still recommend to people to read it!

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I’m not going to lie. This book was so hard for me to get into. I really felt like it kept dragging on. I haven’t read a ton of urban fantasy so maybe that genre isn’t for me. I did like the aspect of an adult fantasy book with lgbtq representation. This book focuses a lot of politics. Racism and and trans issues. Societal issues and is a bit heavy in those regards. Once I got a bit of the way into it I did like it more. So push through the first bit of the book. I really enjoyed the plot twist in the end.

Respectfully, I have been thinking of this book non-stop since I finished it. Well, since I first heard of it really, but even more so since completing it. I have no idea how I am going to survive waiting for the subsequent sequels, but looking into the author's backlog may help me cope.

This was such an intriguing entry into a witches coven story. I loved the the aspects of government controlled and personally run covens. I found the family dynamics interesting and the plot speedy but good.

First off Juno Dawson, I finished your book, and how could you?! You can’t leave me hanging like this! I hope to God you have the second book pretty much finished cause I don’t want to wait two years for the sequel! Hello?!
Already a smash bestseller in London, four adolescent friends on the eve of summer solstice take an oath to join her majesty’s royal coven, which is a covert branch of government established by Elisabeth the first. Years later these four women are grown with varied lives and levels of involvement in the organization. But in all fantasy stories the good must be balanced with the bad, and here it’s taking the guise of a young warlock who, if prophesy comes true, will rain hellfire on earth.
I thought this book was really fun, and found that what could be a run of the mill supernatural story was elevated by the myriad of issues Dawson covers. We have racism, we have the male patriarchy, we have gender and sexuality, all revealed with a group of strong, feisty, kick ass women. It did take me a moment at the start to keep all the characters straight but that cleared up quickly and then it was smooth sailing. If you’re looking for a fun very modern Witch story this one would please your coven no end. Thanks to Penguin books for the #gifted copy.

This was an interesting story. It did take me a while to get into it but once the story started moved I didn't have a problem finish it. The characters were nice and the plot was different. It's different and entertaining story.

The small town of Hebden Bridge is known for two things: The first, it’s bridge; the second, it’s women. Ten years ago, Elle, Niamh, Helena, and Leonie fought and won against the warlock, Dabney Hale, and his group of witches and warlocks who sought to both reveal magic to the world … and to conquer it. They have had ten years of peace, of drifting apart. But now the world needs them to come together again in order to kill the Sullied Child, a child of extraordinary power who will call forth the Leviathan, one of the three great demons, and unleash hell upon the world.

Elle is a nurse who dotes on her children and loves her husband. She is the last of the Device witches — a family as ancient as Her Majesty’s Royal Coven (HMRC) — or so she thought. Her daughter, Holly, is showing signs of power and Elle has only one person to turn to: Niamh. Niamh lost her fiance in the fight against Hale, but more than that, she lost her sister who chose to side with evil and allow a demon to possess her. Now, she works as a vet in Hebden Bridge, trying not to fall for the local delivery man while the two of them bond over horror movies.

Helena rose to power after the battle and now heads HMRC, ruling with an iron fist. When her oracles find the Sullied Child, she can think of only one of her sisters to bring in for help. Niamh, who — despite her gentle and quiet demeanor — is an adept whose power may well rival Helena’s. And then there’s Leonie, the last of them, the perpetual outcast. Black and lesbian, she never fit in to the cookie-cutter coven that told her how to use her power, how to be a witch, how to embrace magic the ‘proper’ way. Having formed her own coven, Diaspora — made of non-white witches and warlocks, as well as magic practitioners of many paths — she has found her own peace.

When Niamh finds out a truth about the Sullied Child, called Theo, she reaches out to Leonie for help … and ends up making a choice that will change the world.

This book is more about womanhood, sisterhood, and self-identity than it is about romance, magic, or drama — though it has all of that in spades. The romance for Niamh is a sweet song playing in the background while Niamh seeks to connect with Theo, who, for all their power, is traumatized, terrified, and helpless. Many fantasy books lightly coat sensitive and heavy topics in elven robes, vampiric coffins, or magical towers — like cheese over vegetables — to make their point subtle and gentle. This book, on the other hand, disdains cheese. It talks openly about racism, how Leonie, as the only black girl in her childhood friend group, had to behave a certain way, talk a certain way, and learn magic a certain way in order to be accepted. It talks about colonialism and how the British covens ‘rescued’ indigenous peoples from their barbaric and uneducated beliefs, teaching them to perform magic in the ‘right’ way. It also talks about gender identity, how HMRC divides magic and positions behind a strict gender binary, choosing not to acknowledge transgender or LGBTQIA+ individuals.

And the narrator of much of these political commentaries is Leonie who, unfortunately, sometimes becomes more a professor than a person. Leonie is very aware of her privilege, being able to afford to start her own coven and having the power to rule it, but there’s almost no sense of her coven beyond their LGBTQIA+ status and that they do not accept white practitioners. Less time is spent on Leonie and her girlfriend than on Niamh and her movie dates with her delivery man, and much of the time other characters spend talking about or with Leonie only serve to enhance her otherness and outsider status, rather than on how she fits together with the other three women. I do wish Leonie had been given more screen time, and that I had been given more time to get to know her as a character, especially in the scenes where all four women came together in a show of raw power where Leonie felt, at times, more like an observer than a powerful witch, especially compared to Niamh and Helena.

Elle is a cheerful, willfully blind healer who wants to keep the peace. She doesn’t like fighting, doesn’t like the ugly side of reality, and hides her true appearance by wearing a glamour around her husband. If it weren’t for her daughter suddenly showing powers, Elle would have happily kept going as she was, half living in the romanticized past and the cheerfully pastoral present. But when push comes to shove, Elle is more than willing to stand her ground. While she will prevaricate between this side or that, she has her own line in the sand, and when those she loves are put in danger, she will fight back. And how she chose to fight, too, was an interesting choice, giving back to someone the harm they had caused in equal measure; Elle is not vengeful, she is exactingly fair.

Niamh is powerful, has always known she was powerful, and has never doubted her ability to do anything. Even when facing down her twin sister ten years ago, she moved with confidence and surety. It isn’t until Theo that she begins to feel out of her depth when the young warlock — who will not or cannot speak, who has lived a life of horrific pain — ends up being a young witch. Theo is transgender, and for once Niamh is out of her depth. How does she help and support Theo? How does she defend Theo from Helena and HRMC? Because it’s not a choice, has never been a choice, to give Theo back. Theo is her chance to do it again, to save someone … as she couldn’t save her sister. Helping Theo doesn’t assuage the guilt, but it gives her a chance when she didn’t think she’d ever have another one.

And then there’s Helena. Vain, insecure, anxious, and high strung, she’s been negged by her mother most of her life. Even her position as head of the coven isn’t enough; her mother will still find ways to pick at her. At her appearance, her weight, her choices as a witch, as a mother… day in and day out. Helena craves power, craves respect and acknowledgement. Niamh, from a poorer house, should have looked up to Helena, but Niamh is more powerful. Elle is more lovely and more loved. Leonie not only left, she made her own coven, as if HMRC wasn’t enough, as if Helena wasn’t enough. And now the three of them are trying to say that Theo — the Sullied Child, prophesied to bring about the monster known as Leviathan — is a girl. Helena is a cold, calculating TERF who has decided opinions and will make them known.

The author has a lot to say in this book about gender, identity, history, and what it is to be a woman. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the writing and character building sometimes suffered because of the message. The pacing was uneven in parts, where the focus would go from an insightful moment on love and acceptance to a lengthy talk about the patriarchy and then to some magic and sisterhood.

And, speaking of sisterhood, there is a choice in here — made by the characters — that rubbed me the wrong way. Elle’s husband is cheating on her, and her friends know. (Hell, in a small town like Hebden Bridge, it’s very likely most of the town knows.) And both Leonie and Niamh have made the choice to not say anything because Elle’s happier not knowing. When her daughter finds out and wants to tell her mom, Niamh erases her memory because … isn’t it mean to Elle to let her know her husband is cheating on her? Because, thanks to the guilt, he’s nice to her when he gets home? Taking away Holly’s agency by simply taking away her memory — without asking for consent — and taking Elle’s ability to make a decision about her own life, feels a little discordant with the themes of the rest of the book. That is, however, simply my opinion on the character’s actions.

However, all that said, the story is interesting. The approach to magic, to covens, and Leonie’s Diaspora — with it’s teachings brought in from all over the world, from so many cultures — is one I very much enjoyed. It’s nice to see witchcraft viewed through a larger and more inclusive lens, and I do think this book is worth the read for what it is.

I loved this book and I already can't wait until the sequel.
I'm a sucker for a story about witches that live in the world of today. I loved Juno Dawson's writing in where she compared witch hunts to how people act in society today.

An excellent read for those who love fantasy!

This was an incredibly relevant story with the author bringing in the transgender aspect to this book. I felt like this was a wonderful revelation to the characters and wasn't just a side note, but a driving factor in the story. I applaud the author for being brave enough to address this issue.

I've said it time and time again that multiple points of view tend to confuse me and this did happen a few times during my read, but I don't think this was a huge turn off and probably just my ability to zone out sometimes while reading. Darn autistic brain.

What a perfect read. A solid 4 stars.

I… don’t think I liked this book. It is a little hard to untangle, because the book is saying things that I agree with, but it is saying them poorly. It took a long time to get into the book and I don’t think characterization was done particularly well - the characters all felt surface level, and Helena was baffling. Leonie was criminally underused.

HER MAJESTY’S ROYAL COVEN
By Juno Dawson

An epic fantasy trilogy book one

This is the story of four childhood friends - witches Helena, Leonie, Niamh and Elle who have taken an oath and are part of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I
Royal Coven (HMRC) that work their craft in times of crisis always just beneath the shadows of our lives, in a fantasy English world.

Now many years later, Helena - the current reigning high priestess of the HMRC and the only one left to manage the Royal Coven, while her other friends have either moved on trying to live a normal life or defected to start their own coven of BIPOC witches . Some issues arise that will bring the coven back together again.

Juno Dawson did a great job setting up this trilogy and intricately weaving a world of feminist values, with a diverse cast, and a thrilling and irresistible group of women, magic and lure.

I cannot wait to read the rest of the series.