The Queen of Blood
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ☆ ☆
The Queen of Blood (The Queens of Renthia, Book 1) by Sarah Beth Durst
Weirdly, not enough exposition.
I appreciate that this book didn’t waste time on heavy exposition, but at the same time, I feel like it needed to, especially when it comes to the setting and the spirits. Aside from their elemental alignment, there’s very little description to help visualize them. Combined with the lack of a clear sense of the world’s geography, it sometimes made scenes hard to picture.
Eventually, I just decided to imagine the spirits as humanoid, fairy-like beings shaped from their respective element. (I’m sure that’s completely wrong, but the text didn’t give me much else to work with.) That mental image fell apart, though, when one of the spirits got cut and started bleeding… like, actual blood.
I don’t want to harp on the author’s world-building, especially since I never felt like I fully understood it, but an elemental spirit bleeding like a human seemed a little weird to me.
