Queen of Chaos by Sabrina Chase is the third and last in the Sequoyah trilogy. I thoroughly enjoyed the first, and left rather too long a gap before reading book 2 last year. Thus I planned to read this early in the new year, and get my Q for the Alphabet Soup Reading Challenge. Then I got another Q to read in January…
Queen of Chaos (Sequoyah #3)
by Sabrina Chase
Queen of Chaos is the third and last in the Sequoyah trilogy. And that is all Goodreads has to say on the matter. Maybe it’s a mistake on behalf of the publisher, maybe there was nothing more to say.
My Review
As I said last year… I read The Long Way Home in the summer of 2020, and was totally engrossed in it. Raven’s Children is just as good, although it took me a while to sort out who was who and what was going on from the first book.
With Queen of Chaos, I worked out roughly who was who in the first part of the first chapter… then we switched to other characters in situations I could only vaguely remember, then switched to a third who initially seemed completely unconnected to the whole story. Somebody wrote a blog post on scene setting recently and I wondered if I was guilty of letting my readers struggle with working out who, what and where of the scene. Sabrina Chase very definitely does. By the end of the second chapter (15% in) I wasn’t sure I wanted to bother with the rest of it.
It’s such a shame. I wonder if she was in such a hurry to get the trilogy completed, she forgot some basics about story telling, or (more likely) was so wrapped up in her story, its world and her characters, that she forgot that her readers might not be. Or maybe she forgot the differences between series and serials. Or maybe her publisher was pressurising her to complete it and skipped some editing processes — and blurb writing.
I did finish it. It has a lot of chaos in it, and plenty more scenes where I wasn’t sure why we were where or who the characters were, and I just rolled with it. But it finished well, and Sabrina Chase writes great battle scenes. Shame about the connectivity.
Hi Jemima how are you keeping.
Thank you for the review… I agree it’s very difficult bro read a book when the plot continueum is floundering about for whatever reason.💜
Writing books in a series has challenges and you have to keep the reader in mind, as you well know!
Major issue with series. Most end up with either too much or too little recapping.
And maybe the main difference lies with the reader and how long between books.