The Queen's Assassin

With regards to YA fantasy, there are many books and authors to choose from. Some authors, like Tamora Pierce, are old hats at this and have been writing YA fantasy since the '80s. Others, like Sarah J. Maas, have recently gained fame with a highly acclaimed series. I, personally, had never read any of Cruz's work, but I was excited to see what she could bring to the genre after I saw her book on sale at Barnes and Noble. I must say that, because of a slow prologue, I decided to rent it from the library, and I am glad that I did, as this book has many excellent ideas, but they are buried under cliches and odd writing style choices.

The first problem that we have with this book is all of the cliches that we see in YA fantasy books are here in spades. Firstly, we have Caledon and Shadow. They have to become a couple because of course they do, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out what they see in each other. Then, they also have to follow the enemies to loves trope, where they hate each other, for some reason, and then slowly fall in love, with plenty of misunderstandings thrown in, because we have to have drama in this story somewhere.

Then there is Shadow herself. She is a Princess who has been exiled to a farm to learn magic, but she does not want to be a Princess, or even a Queen, with the frilly dresses and constant meanless court gossip. She instead wants to be an assassin. She prefers wearing men's trousers and she wants to learn how to kill people in a single blow. Honestly, Shadow feels like every strong female protagonist cliche that we get in YA Fantasy. This makes her forgettable because I feel like I have read her character a million times before.

But the problems with this book do not stop at bad character development and a shoddy romance. No, it extends to an inexplicably terrible decision to write each character in different points of view. Shadow's chapters are written in the first person, while Caledon's are written in the third person. At first, I found this funny since I imagined Caledon referring to himself in the third person inside his own head, but it soon wore thin. Why would an author make this decision? It is just baffling to me and is by far the strongest reason to avoid this book in my opinion.

So who can I recommend this book to? Well, if you want to read something familiar, then I suppose this could be just what you need, but that is a big if. Personally, I would just find another series and skip this one. It isn't even worth starting. I give it a two out of five.