The Queen of Ieflaria by Effie Calvin
My Rating: ★★★★
When Princess Esofi of Rhodia imagined traveling to Ieflaria, she imagined it’d be to wed Prince Albion. Instead, she finds herself traveling there after he dies in a terrible accident and securing an engagement to the next in line to the throne: Princess Adale. Adale wants nothing to do with the engagement, especially because she never fancied herself as the future queen of Ieflaria, but her people need Esofi and her ties to Rhodia before dragons take them out once and for all.
Told in rotating perspectives, we follow Esofi and Adale as they come to terms with Prince Albion’s death and the situation it has put them both in. Esofi is saddled with a princess who doesn’t want to become queen or marry her while grappling with a kingdom that has been forsaken by magic. Meanwhile, Adale is battling a guilty conscious from her involvement in her brother’s death while dreading a marriage she never asked for and a future crown she doesn’t want. I think they’re both interesting and very different characters, so it was fun to watch them fall in love and grapple with several misunderstandings.
I also think that the world building is excellent. I don’t read a lot of high fantasy novels, but I was quite interested in this one due to it being an LGBT novel on top of involving dragons. It was so neat to see the world these characters come together, seeing their individual struggles with the gods and religion itself, and watching them discover that they didn’t know as much about dragons and other entities as they thought.
It’s also a fairly short read with a total of seven chapters and just under 200 pages, so I am truly amazed by how much world building and character development there is. I honestly feel like it was a much longer read in all the right ways. It never felt information heavy either, which is amazing considering how many fantasy elements there are.
That said, I do think that it ended abruptly. I think it could’ve done with at least one more chapter because it seems like there’s a chapter or two missing. So much was going on and then it was suddenly over without much warning. It feels a bit like I watched all but the last 20 minutes of the first season of a new television show. Otherwise, I’m quite excited to check out the next in the series and I hope that future installments don’t end as abruptly as the series opener.
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