This book was disappointing at best. I like the Jane Yolen books I’ve read in the past, so maybe my expectations were a little too high, but Except the Queen just bored me to tears. There were no characters that really caught my attention, no detail, and the plot was so bare-bones that it took me longer than it should have to read. I kept stopping because it was so difficult to get into the story, and there were so many things that were just vague images that never cleared up. There are also chapters where you have no idea whose perspective you are seeing, and it seems to add nothing to the plot.
I was expecting something with the emotional intensity of The Pit Dragon Trilogy or the wonderful storytelling of Sword of the Rightful King, but I got none of these. I almost wonder if the collaboration between Yolen and Snyder is what made the novel so uninteresting. Other collaborative works that I’ve read have turned out pretty well, and followed a similar format, where the main characters write letters to each other in addition to writing directly to the reader about what’s happening to them.
The characters were not fleshed out at all. There are two fairies who are cast out of the Greenwood, and they seem to dwell on that fact. Eventually, they begin to see that there was a good reason for it, but it seems like the authors are so preoccupied in showing how the fairy sisters react to human world objects, like magic brownies, than the emotions that go along with those discoveries. It’s obvious how someone would react to completely foreign objects and customs, so more attention should have been given to who these women are and why they act as they do. There are snippets of information about their pasts, but nothing to add to the superficial image that comes across throughout the novel.
There are also a young girl and boy, each found by one of the fairy sisters. The two young ones both have problems that involve both the human and fairy world, but their problems are so vague. The girl, Sparrow, first appears to be a smoking, drinking mess who drowns her problems instead of facing them. I found out later that her problems went deeper than that, but her story did not make me involved. I didn’t really care about her, as I should have if Yolen and Snyder had taken more time and care in her character. The boy, Robin, was even more frustrating because for the longest time, there was no description of him! I wasn’t sure if he was a dog, a human, some weird combination of the two, or invisible. He only existed in my mind as a personality, not a substantial being.
Everything felt very haphazard, like the authors just took an idea and ran with it without refining it and thinking about the motivations of all of the characters. I believe that the authors did take time to write this as well as they could, but their collaboration probably held them back and allowed them to produce a simply mediocre novel. For example, there is a quote for which I’m not sure if I should blame the authors or their editors: “They each wore a voluminous black ankle-length dress that reached to their ankles…” If they were ankle-length dresses, should I expect them to reach to the ground, or their knees, or be miniskirts? That’s unfortunately the most memorable part of the book because someone overlooked such a simple error.
I’m not giving up on Jane Yolen, and I even might try to find something written by Midori Snyder, but this novel makes me wary of any books I may find in the future that is a collaboration of two writers. I would not recommend this book and I’m glad that I got it on clearance.
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