Golden Queen - Verdict

[kalinara]

Okay, so we've made it through the Golden Queen by Dave Wolverton/David Farland.

Honestly, to misquote Gallen O'Day, it's kind of a "mixed bag of goods."

I think there are things that Wolverton does really well here. Overall, I think the world-building is decent. I still don't quite know how long the dronon have been in power. I probably missed the detail, but I feel like that sort of thing should be more obvious from context than I found it to be. A lot of the locations seemed like they'd been undergoing a societal slump for a very long time. But Everynne herself is only three years old, so the dronon rule probably wasn't that long.

I do like the idea that maybe the Tharrin weren't the perfect administrators they seemed like, but that's not really established. That said, there are still two books in the series, so it's possible that some of the timeline quirks and other mysteries would be solved later.

I think Wolverton did a good job in giving us some very distinct settings. I liked the idea of the Maze of Worlds. I liked the individual stops, which all felt very unique and alien. I like what we've seen of dronon society. They make for some scary villains.

It reminds me a little of Courtship of Princess Leia: the most interesting parts of that book, for me, was the introduction of Hapes and Dathomir. I thought both settings had a lot of interesting potential that the story didn't necessarily explore the way it could have.

I almost think Wolverton missed his calling, and he'd have really excelled as an Ed Greenwood style setting builder. I'm not really a fan of Greenwood's novels, per se, but there's a reason the Forgotten Realms is by far the most popular D&D setting.

--

As for Plot...

I mean, it's not bad. Since Wolverton is working with his own characters, we don't have to wince at Han and Leia's bizarre behavior. There are reasonably high stakes, and the adventure part generally flows.

I'm not sure why Maggie had to get the brunt of the truly horrific experience on Fale though. I'm actually not sure why that whole sequence was necessary at all. It's not like Maggie shows any sort of significant trauma afterward. It did give us a look at how awful the dronons' long term plans were, but the emotional impact really lacked. Especially compared to Gallen's plot, which felt mostly aimless and casual.

The biggest issue I had, I think, is that Wolverton would occasionally choose the wrong viewpoint characters for an event.

Like, I bitched a lot about Gallen and Maggie's relationship. I especially hated how everyone under the sun acted like she owned him, when the ONLY thing he'd ever expressed at that point was that she was too young for him. Then, he sleeps with Everynne and all of a sudden realizes he loves Maggie?

Okay, fine. I can see how that could happen, but that sort of realization works better when we can see Gallen make it! If we had Gallen wake up next to Everynne and think about how it was nice, but he wished for more of an emotional connection, which he had with Maggie... If we saw him look at Maggie and think about how while she's still young, her experiences have given her wisdom and insight...

I feel like that would have worked better.

And I'm still upset to have missed out on Everynne's conversation with Semarritte or Orick. Hmph.

--

For characters:

Eh, another mixed bag really.

Gallen is a decent protagonist. Usually. Except for those weird moments of callous indifference. It was kind of funny that I was reading Golden Queen alongside Jhereg, and the freaking ASSASSIN shows more hesitance and reluctance to torture someone than the more traditional hero. Especially given the tendency that Wolverton has to aggrandize him. Yes, we get it, Gallen is awesome and beautiful.

...seriously though, Gallen's hair is described far more lovingly than Maggie or Everynne ever were. (Isolder also had long blond hair. Maybe Wolverton had hair envy?)

Poor Everynne. She was actually interesting as a character, but she was never allowed to be anything but passive. Even at the end, it's Maggie who brings about their victory. It's Maggie who frees Everynne from the burden of her fate. I mean, I prefer that it was Maggie and not Gallen, but still.

Veriasse...ugh. He started out well, but the blurred lines between Everynne and Semarritte just made things gross. You can't have a heroic character think about Everynne the way he does, when she's calling him father. It just doesn't work.

Maggie is the strongest of the leads, I think. She's forceful, determined, and active. I'm just not particularly fond of her tendency toward domestic abuse.

Orick is the best, of course. Go Orick!

--

So, in the end, I guess my verdict is that the story failed. It wasn't terrible. It had good points. But it never really gelled together the way it should. And the characters, though they had potential, weren't enough to carry me through the annoying parts.

I would maybe give some of his other works a shot though.

Comments

[pangolin20]

Just a heads-up, but could you unbold everything after "characters"?

Yes, a failing grade seems quite appropriate for this work. Any idea which work you'll pick up next?

Also, maybe trying to put your works in a list qua rating could be fun.

[kalinara]

Thanks for the heads up!

Not sure what I'll pick next, floating a few notions

[pangolin20]

Thank you!

[kalinara]

I do think ranking them could be fun, but also a little tricky, since when I like a book, it's usually for different reasons. It'd be hard to try to pull them altogether.

I can definitely say Shapechangers is the worst of the books I've reviewed though.

[pangolin20]

Oh, I certainly see.

I'm interested to see when/if _Inheritance_ becomes worse than Shapechangers for you, because I think there's a good chance it will end up there.

[kalinara]

I doubt it. There's not nearly enough casual racism or rape in the first chapter for it to exceed Shapechangers. It's not great, but there are levels of terrible. :-D

Though if we're comparing series, the Inheritance Cycle may end up worse than the Cheysuli books on a whole. Though that may depend on one's tolerance for incestuous DNA strand family trees.

[pangolin20]

Oh, I'm am 100% sure it won't happen in this book yet. Maybe Eldest, and definitely Inheritance itself, when the books echo Mists of Avalon uncannily close at times.

And Eragon kind of works for me, as a cheesy dozen-a-dime fantasy book. A bit like Golden Queen, come to think of it, though with a bit less creepy sexual behaviour (we do have Eragon be attracted to Arya when she's comatose, though), and sadly with less talking bears.

Though that may depend on one's tolerance for incestuous DNA strand family trees.

I mean, if the rest of the series is good enough, it probably won't be that much of a problem. When the rest is crap, too, you end up with stuff like the Axis Trilogy.

[kalinara]

I find the latter half of the series far more readable, tbf. It does get a little dicey when you think about how Brennan and Aileen/Keely and Sean are actually second cousins, and they're the LEAST related romantic pairings that will come up later.

[pangolin20]

I certainly got that impression already, and it's quite a relief.

[pangolin20]

Come to think of it, which book you reviewed here do you like best?

[kalinara]

I'm not sure that's a fair question, because there are books that I specifically chose as antidotes to having to read a few miserable books in a row. But I definitely enjoy the Vampire Files series and the Dragaera series on my own time.

Wait, no. My FAVORITE books I've reviewed here are probably the batshit insane Janny Wurts novels (Starting with Curse of the Mistwraith). They're massively fun to review because I genuinely do love the ridiculous idiot characters and storyline, but there's also so much to make fun of each time. It's hilarious purple prose, everyone's a Mary Sue, I utterly despise the main good guy mentors and rant endlessly. I love them. No lie.

The catch is that the shortest of them is like 500-some pages, and each "chapter" is comprised of at least three normal-sized chapters. So they are a TIME commitment. And I just haven't had the stamina to go for the next one.

[pangolin20]

Oh, I saw your reviews. :)

And yes, having an average chapter length of like 5000 words doesn't make it easy. Of course, you could try splitting chapters...

The series I like most, and which I plan to review on here are The Keys to the Kingdom, and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I bet you're interested to see how the latter one pans out.

[kalinara]

Could be interesting!

[bestbrotherever]

This book. So frustrating. It has a lot of good ideas! The world is genuinely imaginative! The characters have potential! But there's so many Wolvertonisms that undermines it all. Still, I keep thinking about how to fix it.

Gallen is the weakest link IMO as just the standard Perfect Success Hero, and I realized that the story is missing the viewpoint of an ordinary high-tech human, so my idea for him is to make him an Upworlder who ran away to a Backwarder world as a youth, expecting that with his Superior Knowledge (and a basic Guide/mantle) he'd an ace among the tech-deprived. And for a while he was, using his Guide to supply him the knowledge to blend in and the skills to excel at fighting. I'd actually have it be a mid-story twist that he's not from a native of faux-Ireland, which might be tricky and cut down on his POV scenes, but would that really be a loss? It could also greatly change the reason why he rejects Maggie, from thinking she's too young, to seeing her as a Backwarder he'll eventually leave behind. They've been romantically involved in the past, but now that she's wanting to get serious, he wants to back out, but he can't tell her why. His opinions change as he travels with Veriasse and Everynne and realizes that he's barely more worldly than Maggie, and she has the potential to thrive in his world as much as he did in hers.

I'd also set the timeline for the dronon to be much shorter. As in most of humanity didn't even know they existed when Gallen left for faux-Ireland, so the sudden insect overlords shocks him as much as Maggie. And rather than having them be evil, I'd make it more an extreme culture clash because that was the first time either species had ever met any other alien. The humans didn't realize that the ritual combat was for rulership of their entire civilization, and the dronon didn't realize that the humans don't know that. They think of humans as a hive that's broken down and they're trying to reimpose the proper order, but as humans keep fighting their "fixing" methods, they think that maybe humanity is just rabid and needs to be wiped out. Veriasse's plan is also an attempt to demonstrate that humans can understand dronon customs and adhere to them when they want, as long as the dronon stop trying to remake humanity into dronon. Maybe the current Golden Queen is also more of a conqueror than others, who were more willing to let hives be separate as long as they stay separate.

Veriasse would be a lot better if we were supposed to think he was skeevy the whole time and if he was starting to regret the "turn his daughter into his dead wife" part of his plan by the end.

I think the Tharrin should be, like, AI that created human bodies for themselves, instead of humans engineered to be perfect. They've always been mostly, but not quite, human, and their skill at administrating is because that's what their AI progenitors were made for, and the ones like the old Queen are ones that chose to perfect that skill because they wanted to keep helping humans. Everynne's still a posthumous clone of the dead Queen, but because of the circumstances around the dronon takeover, she wasn't raised at all like a new Tharrin but more with the expectation of being the Queen's replacement, and since the situation is so unprecedented, nobody knows what will happen when she connects to the omni-mind. "She'll end up just being the Queen's new body and everything Everynne will be erased/suppressed" is the expectation, but there's enough room for doubt.

Everynne meeting the old Queen in the omni-mind has to be its own scene. And I'd want the Queen to see Everynne as her daughter and successor instead of placeholder on her own. Like "My only regret is that I could not be your mother before this. I will never take away your life." Tharrin administrators are perfectly compassionate and empathetic, and that includes with each other and not just the humans they look after.

[kalinara]

Those are all fantastic changes!