The Traitor Queen

An enjoyable read and a nice conclusion to the (second) trilogy. However it felt a bit rushed and almost too neat at the end with a lack of twist and an essentially the ending you cold (largely) predict by midway through the first book.

The conclusion to this trilogy was rather flat, bland and did not live up to my expectations of previous books by Canavan.

My review of the second book in this series mentioned how much it stagnated and suffered from middle book syndrome, and this book didn't seem to change pace from the second much at all. I feel like this series was written more as an indulgence out f love for the world rather than because there was a plot to be told. As such, it felt like the plot meandered along at a slow pace until it came time to wrap everything up.

I think this has something to do with my preference for grittier, more viseral stories in fantasy. Some authors prefer the more positive style of story telling, which means any unpleasentness gets glossed over as much as possible. This leaves me missing a fuller experience of the plot and characters, as we don't experience hardship and struggle the same way. I am hopeful that some of Canavan's other stories make a bigger impact in these areas.

I would skip this series if you aren't too interested, but it was quite a nice series for a little bit of nostalgia.

This is the 6th book of the two series that I've read from [a:Trudi Canavan 15890 Trudi Canavan http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1194378660p2/15890.jpg] and I actually like the Traitor Spy Trilogy better than the Black Magician Trilogy. Based on the few reviews I looked at before going into the second trilogy I was surprised this was the case because so many like the first trilogy better. The second trilogy is more subtle and more realistic about the issues we all have to consider in our lives. There isn't black and white there are always exceptions to the rules and how we deal with them is the story. The second trilogy explores this more and made me think more than the first trilogy. There were a lot of unknowns in the first trilogy and because we didn't know the main character of Akkarin very well he wasn't that fleshed out. I also felt that some of the characters were just there while and the actual storyline wasn't that complicated.