Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake

I first heard about this book from someone on Dayre and I immediately wanted to read it because of:

1. The cover (quite rare for me), and

2. The rhyme, which I'm gonna quote so it can get into all of your heads.

Three dark queens
Are born in a glen
Sweet little triplets
Will never be friends

Three dark sisters
All fair to be seen
Two to devour
And one to be Queen

I was actually a bit scared to read this book because I saw that this book was really polarising and I've been giving up on books really easily lately. But as it turns out, I really loved this!

So basically the country in Three Dark Crowns believes that every queen is given triples by the goddess, and the three will grow up and one will kill the other two to become queen (until she gives birth).

In this generation, we have Katherine, the poisoner who has almost no ability to withstand poison; Arsinoe, who despite being a naturalist can't control nature; and Mirabella, who is the strongest of three and can actually control the elements she's meant to.

While it seems like Mirabella is definitely going to become Queen, each faction conspires to make their queen the Queen. For example, the poisoners have been ruling for the past few generations and they are determined that Katherine should become queen to solidify their rule. And as you can imagine, with all these secret agendas, each sister only hears misinformation about the other two.

While I normally root for the character I see first (which would be Katherine), I actually like Mirabella the best! She's the only one of the three who still cared for her sisters after all these years. The other two totally bought into the brainwashing, even if they weren't sure they could become queen. Plus she had the clearest growth arc of the three.

On the other hand, my least favourite character was Arsinoe, because she struck me as a bit whiny, didn't seem to have a lot of character growth and was way too dependent on her best friend, Jules. But I quite liked her by the end of the book so it was not like she permanently irritated me.

Quite a few of the reviews I saw mentioned that there were too many characters to remember, but I didn't have a problem with that. Everyone was pretty distinctive to me. Then again, I used to watch Ai (and all those ah ma shows which cover several generations) so maybe I'm just used to stuff like that.f

Overall, I really loved the book. It's basically the first book in a series so you should expect to see alliances formed and plots being set. (I suspect the next book will step up the pacing, though I have no problems with how it is here). I would have preferred for everything to be in one book, but that would have made it insanely long. So I'd just eagerly wait for the second book and hope the NLB gets it soon!