Three Dark Crowns

With the recent release of the second book in this series I decided that I really needed to get myself organised and delve into Three Dark Crowns before I started hearing too many spoilers about the series online. I haven't read any books by Kendare Blake before but reviews about Three Dark Crowns seem to be generally good and the plot sounded really intriguing so I was happy to give it a go.

This is a dark, fairytale in atmosphere story about 3 sisters, triplets, who are born Queens then separated and fostered to different homes based on their special talent. When they turn 16 they will each have the chance to fight for the throne, whoever wins will reign until their own triplets are born. The two losers will be killed at the hand of the victor.

The first chapters of the book are quite lengthy as we are introduced to each of the triplets in turn. Firstly we meet Queen Katherine, a poisoner, who is able to withstand any venom and can create deadly potions of her own. We meet the people raising her after 3 generations of poisoner Queens they have grown powerful and will do anything to put a 4th poisoner Queen on the throne. Katherine is not as strong as she looks though and is struggling to survive the demands placed upon her.

We then meet naturalist Queen Arisone, wild and carefree she has grown up surrounded by friends who have protected her and now she turns 16 she needs to face up to the fact that her gifts have not arrived as yet, she should be able to make flowers grow and fields bloom and animals do her bidding but she cannot and soon everyone will learn the truth.

Finally, we meet Queen Mirabella, the Elementalist who can command the elements, the wind, fire, water and the earth. Mirabella is strong and word has spread of her strength. The priestesses of the temples have led her tuition and they will stop at nothing to oust the poisoners from the throne and see the true Queen ascend to her rightful place, even if they need to rig the outcome.

This book was wonderful, it is full of really great characters in the lives of each of the Queens who we come to love. Particularly wonderful is the world of Arisone and her best friend Jules, the strongest naturalist in the community who will do anything to protect her friend and help her to become the new Queen. The characters in the story are really well crafted and it is so easy to become invested in them all and they are all quite distinct so although there are lots of them across each of the three queens courts you don't get confused.

I really enjoyed the atmosphere in the book, the question of whether the sisters will come to fulfil the prophecy and kill each other or who is the rightful queen. The book asks you to question which one is your favourite but as the book goes on you find each girl has her own attributes that would make her a good Queen but if I had to say which one I was rooting for secretly I'd have to say Arisone but then the cliff-hanger at the end of this book was wonderful and left me quite shocked and desperate to see how this will progress as we move into book 2. It helped to make sense of some of the story in Three Dark Crowns but sets up wonderfully for us to continue the story.

I loved my first experience of Kendare Blake's writing, I really enjoyed the style in which the book was written. The narrative was exicting and the plot moved along nicely with plenty of action without skimping on the relationships within. I would highly recommend this book and I know I won't be able to hold off long before picking up the sequel, One Dark Throne.

I read this a while ago, I thought I had reviewed it. I even remember writing the review. I had this as an arc, maybe it was when booklikes was not being user friendly.

This is young adult fantasy. It has some pretty dark themes. You have three sisters, triplets, each a potential queen. In order to determine which will rule there is a battle of skills. Each sister has a gift: elemantal, poisoner, naturalist. The girls are raised separate from each other and are strictly trained at their skill. Some sisters are excelling, others not so much.

This is told from tyre different POVs, it can get a bit confusing at times. This does start a bit slow and the first half is tedious at times. You basically get three indroductions, one for each sister. The second half gets much better. We a have a love triangle of sorts, but this not a sappy one by any means. In the end there is a big twist revealed, I had a suspicion as to it happening a few chapters in, but it took me by surprise regardless.

I found myself rooting for the underdog and feel that by the end of the book she stands a decent chance. I will continue this series, mostly because I want to see if the author will give us a Happily ever after, or let this finish darkly. The writing is average at first but it does get better.

Wow... dark is an understatement. Even though these characters are twisted and all trying to kill each other you still get kind of attached to the and have sympathy for their story.
I'll give the next book a try, but to my friends you've been warned...very, very dark.

4 stars I think. This was great and helped pull me out of my reading slump. Full review to come!FULL REVIEW:I'm a huge YA Fantasy fan, so when I heard the pitch for [a:Kendare Blake 4086715 Kendare Blake https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1276645449p2/4086715.jpg]'s Three Dark Crowns, I was definitely curious. Combined with an awesome cover and an unusual tense choice (third person present) and I was glad I picked it up.Initially I was a little confused about why there were so many POVs—I was expecting three (one for each princess) and I think we end up with...five? Something like that. For the first portion of the book, I know the many POVs made it difficult for some people to get into it. I just rolled with it, and in the end it made sense as to why every POV was necessary. I will say I did find it a little difficult to keep track of all the names and places (the map helped with the latter, though), so sometimes I confused characters. But once I got used to the cast, that became no longer distracting. So that said, there were two things I really liked about this book: the magic, and the sisters themselves. There are a lot of takes on magic in YA, and many of them look like Mirabella: some sort of elemental stuff with extras thrown in. Nothing wrong with that, I love elemental magic portrayals, but I was really fascinated by the magic of the poisoners and naturalists. The poisoners especially was magic I hadn't seen before in YA, and it was super fascinating to see how that magic manifested (or how it was supposed to manifest, anyway), how it affected the way other people looked at them, and how they “showed it off” to demonstrate power—and the ruse of power. What I really liked about the sisters was they exceeded my expectations in multiple ways. I'd expected Mirabella to be the “evil twin” in the sense that as the most powerful (whether she knows it or not) she'd be biting at the bit to take out her other two sisters, but she was much more complicated than that. But what I especially loved about the three was they demonstrated a variety of ways to “be a girl” without ever implying one way is better than the other. Katherine and Mirabella are both traditionally feminine and take power in their femininity—which was awesome to see. On Fennbirn, women are the top of the power totem pole, so the girls never deal with misogyny and in many ways, their femininity was used as a display of power (yay!). Arsinoe, however, is an entirely different kind of girl. She's defiant, cuts her hair short, and never once wears a dress—even in the scenes where the girls are expected to dress formally, she stands beside her two sisters in dresses wearing a black shirt, vest, and pants. I loved this, because I've literally never seen a princess portrayed as anything short of femininely unless she was in disguise—and as a bonus, Arsinoe never gets any grief over it. She's accepted as she is, and while acknowledged as different, no one ever implies her less feminine style is a bad thing. So all in all, I found this book fascinating—and I was so glued I read sixty percent of it in one day. While I didn't love some of the details at the end, I really enjoyed this one overall and I'm very much looking forward to the next book, [b:One Dark Throne 29923707 One Dark Throne (Three Dark Crowns, #2) Kendare Blake https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1487862160s/29923707.jpg 50306201]. Diversity note: From what I could tell, not much there, unfortunately.

I haven't read YA in a while and figured what the hell, I should. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great either. It was confusing to follow at times because there were just so many random names being thrown in and it was hard to keep everyone straight. Also, the world building was clumsy and nowhere near as good as it should or could have been.

This book was not great. Not terrible either though. And considering my feelings on Anna Dressed in Blood that's really not a huge surprise. Kendare Blake writes to a younger portion of the YA demographic, and has a gift for unique stories and creating some evocative scenes and moments. But her style is...gentle. I was not expecting anything earth-shattering. But with such a great premise as this, I was definitely hoping for more.

The three 16-year-old queens of a remote magical island are sisters Arsinoe, Katharine and Mirabella. In order for one of them to ascend to the throne, the other two must die. Thankfully, they all have super powers to aid them in this endeavor, but sadly Arsinoe and Katharine's powers have yet to manifest, while Mirabella's are flourishing with leaps and bounds. But things aren't that simple. While Mirabella can generate storms and dance with fire, she has intimate memories of her sisters that she's not supposed to have, and the thought of doing them harm paralyzes her. Meanwhile, Katharine may not be able to hold down her belladonna like she should, but she's a masterful poisoner raised by some pretty scary people, and Arsinoe is tough as nails even if she can't make a single bud bloom. It's a great set up, with some really interesting world-building to support it. But I don't think Blake started this story near enough to its end.

The premise of this book is striking, but the storytelling feels lazy. There's a lot of time spent of each of the queens in their own worlds, with their friends and falling in love with boys. I'm not sure why. Katharine's story line with Pietyr was probably the most interesting to me, maybe just because the poisoners seem strange and wicked and glamorous and I am very about that. Mirabella's story also isn't bad since it is more closely tied to the central conflict, but it could have easily been condensed. Her poorly thought out plans to run away multiple times felt silly. Why bother with a contrived reason for Mirabella to bump into Arsinoe when you can just move the story forward instead? We also get an additional perspective in the naturalist world from Arsinoe's adoptive sister, Jules, who is probably the most talented naturalist on the island. We get to know about this cute little love story between Jules and one of her and Arsinoe's childhood friends that goes sour because Mirabella sleeps with him and....hold on, what? This is not the book I signed up for.

Instead of a more tightly wound story involving three queens plotting against each other, we get three insecure young women whose lives are controlled by the more powerful women around them. Instead of poisoner plots and palace intrigue, we get side quests and love triangles. As said, it's not awful. The queens are interesting, well-written characters who carry their stories well, and their world is a rich and intriguing one. But this book plays very light-footed with what should have been a stronger, more dangerous, more plot-driven story.

Despite this, the great question still hangs over the story, generating a lot of mystery. Were Arsinoe and Katharine swapped and are trying to manifest powers that they don't have? Is Jules secretly a queen? Does one of them have one of the other two gifts that a queen could have - the sight or the mysterious war gift? Or is it something even stranger? This is the main reason why I fully intend to read the next book, but I still wish Blake had given us more of a resolution at the end of this book and answered more of those questions. Honestly, Three Dark Crowns doesn't hold its own very well as the first installment in this series. It's not a complete story. It's more like a meandering prologue that features the emotional lives of three girls in a strange situation, and it just so happens to have a wee bit of a climax at the end.

This book is worth reading for the universe and what I am hoping will be the larger story. It's also fairly enjoyable. Not riveting and page-turning but...nice. There are worse things a book can be, I guess.

HOOOO. MY. GOODNESS.

Did this author write this novel specifically for me? It's possible. SOOOO many things I love, all in one book. Dark fantasy - check. Complicated religious structure - check. Twisty turns I don't see coming - check. Kick**s heroine - check TIMES THREE.

It's been a while since I've read a good YA fantasy, and I'd forgotten how much fun it is to loose myself so completely in a world. I couldn't turn the pages fast enough, yet I didn't want it to end. I am SO all in for this series. Cannot WAIT for volume two!!

I don't usually like YA Fantasy; in fact, I actively avoid anything relating to that particular genre, because, as interesting as the premise may be, it will, inevitably, dive much deeper into the relationships, and how the girl is stuck in a love triangle, or quadrangle or whatever. No doubt, several paragraphs will be spent in describing how steamy the kisses were, how conjoined their bodies were during intercourse, how inseparable they were, how much they loved each other, and how devastated they were when the other died. Then again, my view is very prejudicial. I just don't like the writing.
But man, oh, man this book. The premise was so interesting that I just had to pick it up to read, and as I was reading I was desperately hoping that, with every page I turned, with every new chapter I begun, the character wouldn't fall in love with the nearest hot male character and then ruin the book. I was even willing to risk the love stuff for this book.
The premise is super interesting: there are three sisters, which are split up and given to different “clans” who specialize in certain abilities - the Poisoners, the Naturalists, and the Elementalists. These girls will grow up and learn their respective abilities, and when the time comes, something called Beltane, they will try and kill the other sister and take the throne. The time after the Belatane festival in which one of the sisters attacks one of the others is called the Ascension Year. And whichever sister gets to the throne, the respective clan will, therefore, reap the benefits.
There's nothing particularly brilliant about the prose, but it nonetheless flows seamlessly. We are introduced to each of the three sisters and their closest folk, and we read a lot of rumination on the interesting magic system, and ways and means of killing the other sister through out the book.
The best part? There is only one tiny bit where a sex scene is described in detail, and that is one of the very very few intimate scenes in the novel.
The story is really interesting; I love the world in which they live; I love the magic system; I love the concept that the novel explored. It is really quite unique; I don't think I've ever come across any such novel.
This, though, ends on a cliffhanger that'll leave you wanting the next book immediately. I just cannot wait till later this year for the sequel. ARGH!

3.5 Stars. Spoilers ahead

It is hard to tell when to round stars up or down, but I decided to round up because I liked how savage Katharine seemed at the end.

To be really honest, the first half of this book is slow, its about the 3 sisters, with 3 different abilities, and them honing their skills. Katharine is a poisoner, which should mean she can eat any poisons, the more she can eat, the stronger a poisoner she is. Arsinoe is a naturalist, so she can control nature? And Mirabelle is an elemental, she appears to be the strongest so far.
SpoilerWe all saw that Arsinoe and Katharine were switched right? HOWEVER, why did the snake try to bite Katharine at the beginning of the book if she is the actual naturalist queen?

Besides that, the book had its moments of being dull, and being pretty good. Mostly the dull moments were around Arsinoe for me, I really like Katharine and Pietyr, until he pulled that this is sparta move on her. I wonder what her revenge will be.

I hope this will only continue to be a 2 or 3 book series, I dont think I will be able to keep up with it if it gets longer. But so far Three Dark Crowns has my attention, and I will be on a lookout for the next book,.

《Three Black Witches are born in a glen,Sweet little tripletsWill never be friends.Three Black Witches, all fair to be seen.Two to devour,And one to be queen.》

The ending. THAT ENDING ALMOST KILLED ME.
DAYUM!!! Just give me the next book, I'm begging you!!!!!

This was alright.
It is NOT what's promised by the cover synopsis. There is no battle to the death between three sisters, there are no terrible moral decisions between family and survival. No no, this novel is entirely about the PREPARATIONS for that. As long as you know that going in, it is not a bad book.

Sure, the focus is mostly on the numerous romances and love triangles/squares/whatevers that spring up like mushrooms, but underneath all that, there are three very intriguing sisters living in three different but no less intriguing surroundings.
More focus on the side characters wouldn't have hurt. To me, most of them were just random names that randomly say stuff. Only the protagonists and their lovers had any personality. And of course the scheming people in the background, but they also kind of blur into the same person.

So yeah, it's a flawed book, it's not what marketing says it is but it has potential. And after this, the second book is definitely going to be that royal Battle Royale we were all kind of hoping for.

Full review hiding under this link

Holy smokes, this book. I started it Thurs. night and read every spare minute until yesterday when I finished. Had I been less busy,3 Crowns would have been finished in a night. Blake's storytelling is just mesmerizing. I loved Anna Dressed in Blood. This one though-hoo boy!

Here's the thing, had I known it was going to be a series, I would not have read it yet. I'll probably have a hundred plus books in by the time the second one comes out and I wont remember this super intense plot. So, be forewarned! I may end up have to reread.

I'm going to stay spoiler-free here and say that I loved each of the queens equally. I just don't have a clear favorite and I think they have one of the worst scenarios I've ever read in fiction (just shy of The Hunger Games).

This also a very feminist read- and before you even say that she is degrading men I just want to point out that ALL of the males in this story are the EXACT stereotypes of the female characters in every high fantasy story since the dawn of time. There is the one that is a lover, that creates tension in warring houses, there is the bridegroom to be auctioned off to increase a powerful family's standing, and there is a martyr who wants to protect the hero at whatever cost. Just because they are not locked in towers awaiting queens to rescue them the tropes are all present and have been cleverly gender reversed. It's all a bit delicious actually.

To recap: I love, love, loved this. I wish like hell I had not read it. Not yet.

2019 review edit: Just finished this for a second time. This time I listened to the audio. The plan is to do all three books in preparation for the publication of the 4th (and final?) book.
Still love it.

Actual rating: 4.5 stars, rounded down

First, let me confess the fact that I am a huge fan of Kendare Blake's writing. I devoured her Anna books, with their deliciously gore filled pages. I madly paged through the Goddess War series, thoroughly enjoying Blake's mythological tale. So, of course, there was no doubt that I would want to dive right into Three Dark Crowns and the start of a new series. Plus, it was Fantasy. My favorite genre, written by one of my favorite authors? I'm so in.

Alas, the premise to this story far exceeded the actual execution in this first book. I can forgive a lot when it comes to Fantasy, but the world building has to be spot on. Without good world building, everything else that is built has nothing to cling to. Which was the case here. Blake starts out by laying the groundwork for the story of these three triplets who must fight for the title of queen. In order to claim the throne, a girl must murder the other two. Sounds amazing, right? I thought so too. If only that had been more laid out, Blake would have had me hook, line and sinker.

Instead, this first book chooses to focus heavily on each girl individually. I understood that, after a bit. The aim was to build up each girl and allow them to gain their own distinct personality. That worked to a certain extent. We meet Arsinoe, the naturalist queen who can't seem to find her gift. Mirabella, the elemental queen who is fiercely good at harnessing her power. Katherine, the poisoner queen who is unsure of herself at the best of times. Each of these girls had their own POV, that alternated by chapter. I liked that, because it gave us a glimpse into their different lives. However their voices weren't ever quite as distinct as I had hoped, and it made it difficult to transition at times.

As for the plot, I was willing to forgive how slowly it started out because I know there are good things coming around the bend. It takes while for Three Dark Crowns to build up steam (admittedly a longer while than I expected), but once it does things get very exciting! The use of magic, the backstabbing, all of it finally caught me up around the last third of the book. I could definitely have done without the beginnings of a love triangle, but I'll let it go. As long as it doesn't dominate the next book.

So, although this wasn't quite what I was hoping for and never quite got up to receiving that 4th star, this is a series that I'll be continuing on with. What can I say? I have faith in Kendare Blake.