Title: The Crown of Embers
Author: Rae Carson
Pages: 410
Publisher: Greenwillow
Rating: Worthy!
You can read my review of volume one in this trilogy, Girl of Fire and Thorns here.
You can read my review of volume three in this trilogy, The Bitter Kingdom here.
For some reason I keep wanting to call this novel Crown of Thorns. Also I keep mistyping Thorns as Throns, so if I'm reviewing something here that sounds like Game of Thrones, hopefully, you'll understand!
The problem with a volume 2 is that the author has nothing intrinsically new to offer you. We have already met the protagonist; we have already entered the world the author has built. We know everything - so we believe. So what second course can the author bring to the table to make us salivate and our stomach rumble for more? Clearly we expect more of the same! That's what attracted us to the first volume and it’s what made us want a second volume, but if we get precisely more of the same, we reject that as being warmed-over and uninteresting. There has to be something new, but it can’t be too new! The poor author cannot win! This is especially true when vol 2 follows a debut novel. Before, we had nothing to compare it with (not by that same author!). Now we do.
Props then for Carson even daring to go to volume 2 when volume one was so very satisfying. But can she give again what she successfully gave before and still make it different? The first vol was a coming-of-age novel, but it was also a road trip, and it was a 'dowdy'-princess-makes-good kind of a novel, it was a spy novel, and a war novel, it was a fantasy and a reality. She gave so much in such variety and with such delightful inventiveness that she is now her own worst enemy! So what does Rae Carson have to bring? Let's see!
The first novel ended happily, but it was not ever after. The people were victorious in war, the princess became queen, she kept her promises to her allies, but she was still young, still single (rendered so by the death of her husband), and she now has to deal with issues of state, and the state is one of disrepair. There are problems created by her husband being so weak, there is a lack of money on the treasury because of the war; there is general discontent. Worse than this, there is a resentment amongst some that the nation is now ruled over by a foreigner. It’s almost like the enemy won and the country is occupied.
Far from happily ever after, the first thing which happens to Queen Elisa in vol 2 is the appearance, during a birthday parade, of an animagus, who demands that the queen voluntarily come with him or people will die. He's brought down by an arrow, and immolates himself. Elisa is rushed back to safety. This is a mistake in my opinion, because now the people have seen the queen threatened and running away, leaving her people behind, but maybe Carson has some undisclosed purpose here. Her problems are only exacerbated by their finding that the gates are down and she cannot get into her own palace!
They have to sneak into the palace through a secret tunnel hidden in a blacksmith's shop. Here is something which will no doubt be used later in the story. While wandering the tunnel, Elisa encounters a harmless blue scorpion, and learns of a much more harmful one which she somehow failed to encounter during her sojourn in the badlands in vol 1. No doubt we will be hearing of that later, too. Elisa also learns of an adviser by the name of Lord Franco, who is doubtlessly to be the villain here because he twice crosses her attention and when she asks to see him, she's told that he's gone south to oversee some work or other. How convenient! Perhaps he is still in the palace? We don’t know.
Safely back in the palace herself, Elisa orders the gates to be raised to calm the people, and she calls an immediate meeting of the quorum of five. The outcome of that meeting is that we learn that Elisa is also weak - as weak as her husband, and despite her bravery and triumph in the previous novel. This doesn’t sit well, but I suppose that Carson has to do something to make her seem vulnerable in order to give her something over which to triumph later. I'm just not convinced that this is the smartest approach! Elisa is intimidated by the quorum, and she is disrespectfully talked over (by her own account) yet she shows none of the decisiveness and leadership here which she has shown elsewhere. This seems out of character to me. The immediate outcome of this meeting is that the quorum has decided she must marry a strong husband!
She doesn't rail against this. She makes no argument about her leadership in bringing down the enemy, she meekly accepts this (at least superficially) and tells them that she will consider their list. This is a bit absurd, because it was clear in vol one that she has the hots for Lord Hector, and Carson telegraphs in vol 2 (and more than once), how young he is - he's young enough to be her husband, hint, hint, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more!
I was disappointed in Carson with this. After her commendable introduction of an overweight protagonist in vol 1, she rather quickly slims Elisa down, thereby betraying her initial premise. I was willing to overlook that because she did it in a rational way that was entirely in keeping with her plot, and she did it by treating the disease - that of Elisa's lack of confidence - and not by treating the symptoms. But in vol 2 she is betraying that by painting Elisa as still lacking confidence in vol 2!
Yes, she's put her into new circumstances, but I can’t buy this as well as I bought the premise vol 1. It’s a backward step, and worse than this, after coming out strongly against a bias against overweight people, we now have Carson showing a huge bias against age! She's essentially trumpeting that unless Lord Hector is almost boyish, he cannot possibly be considered a suitable match for Elisa - and this in a society she has created where young girls were routinely married off to older men! I know this is a YA novel, and I'm not saying she should necessarily have Elisa marry a wrinkled, graying guy just to make a point, but after setting up Elisa as someone who is determined to marry for love, Carson is now telling us that unless Elisa loves someone her own age, or near enough, she will forbid the match?! It doesn’t sit well, and is really a betrayal of the admirable principles she displayed in vol 1.
Of course after having shown no mercy whatsoever in not only killing off Elisa's husband (whom she didn't actually love per se, but for whom she definitely had the hots and with whom she might have fallen in love, given time) but in also killing off her actual love interest (Humberto), perhaps she plans on killing off Hector in this vol?! We'll see!
Another small issue is Elisa’s visit that night to the catacombs to be at her husband's grave. This seems out of place given her lack of a relationship with him throughout vol 1, but it does give an assassin a great opportunity to kill her. She feels a gust of wind, which conveniently blows out the torch so we don’t know who attacks her. She's cut on her arm and stabbed in the stomach, but the godstone in her navel deflects the blade and saves her from death, although, having her completely at his (or maybe it's a her - there is a lady in the quorum of five who seems too much of an airhead to be true!) mercy, why the assassin fails to finish the job is an unexplained mystery.
Carson loves to describe Elisa as having crusty eyes when she tries to wake from a drugged sleep, and this is what we find here. One almost wonders how many drugged sleeps Carson has endured that this aspect made such an impression on her! It’s three days later, and Elisa is resurrected from the 'dead' like a Messiah! Is this portentous or just poorly pretentious? She learns that decisions have been made due to her incapacity. She neither acts nor reacts strongly against these despite one of them - the raising of taxes - causing riots. She does not rescind the order. Another decision is to execute one of her favorite guards, one who is expecting a child which will be named Elisa if it’s a girl. He is blamed for the assassination attempt. Elisa arrives just a fraction too late to save his life, and she orders that restitution be made to the guard's wife, but she does not invite her into the palace, which it seems to me the Elisa of vol 1 would have done.
She does call in the General Luz-Manuel and gives him a half-hearted dressing down over the execution, which somehow endears her guards to her. Later, Elisa gets a bee in her bonnet about the assassination attempt down in the crypt, and she goes down there with Hector, another guard called Fernando, and with Ximenia and Mara. They discover a trapdoor, and all but Mara want to explore. Mara has an abdominal injury just like Elisa, but she has no godstone and therefore isn’t healing as fast, so Elisa sends her back to cover for them as they go on a foray down the hatch, down the steps, follow the river which lies beneath, and climb more steps at the end. They discover that they're in a large, open-ended cave system by the ocean which is occupied by a whole bunch of people - people who evidently fell through the cracks in the system (assuming there's a system here!).
Elisa informs those living there that she wishes to speak to their leader, who turns out to bear the name of Lo Chato, the very name borne by the first animagus she killed - or thought she had. (Does 'Lo Chato mean he speaks little? Or he speaks softly and carries a big stick?!). Whatever! He isn’t there at the time, so she extends an invitation for him to visit her up the palace so they can have a chat, and she guarantees him safe passage, but he probably doesn’t own a safe. (Just kidding).
Returning to the palace, she finds herself understandably weary, but she can rest only briefly before she has to meet with potential suitors. The first turns out to be thoroughly unappreciated, but the second piques her interest slightly. Poor malingering Hector has to sit with her whilst she interviews potential mates, and Carson uses this opportunity to drop another huge hint that he's an eligible bachelor and one of the highest ranking men in the kingdom. But Elisa is evidently just as stupid here as she was with both Humberto and her husband. She has no idea when someone has the hots for her. So much for growth! So she doesn't realize that Hector would be the perfect mate for her. Will she ever? Only Carson will tell!
I have to confess right here and now that I don't get Elisa in vol 2 at all! She seems so different from the one with whom we fell in love in vol 1. When there's a poisoning attempt, which she assumes is on her (and it may well be so), she has the kitchen staff flogged, even though she has a ready victim (perhaps not the one who poisoned the scones) who has apparently killed himself. She could have chosen to present his body to the public along with a story that another assassination attempt was foiled. Instead she presents to the public a shameful flogging of all the kitchen staff, the women of which are further humiliated by having their robes stripped down to their waist. This is not the Elisa I loved in vol 1. Not even close. I don’t even like this Elisa.
When she wants to speak to Lo Chato again, her racism towards him is appalling. She has no care for him or his position, despite the fact that he has voluntarily helped her and sworn allegiance to her. She humiliates him by having him publicly arrested and flung into the prison tower of the castle where conditions are appalling, and for no good reason. When she visits him in the prison tower, she takes her stepson Rosario with her! Despite these assassination attempts, Rosario has no guards at all. He could be harmed or kidnapped and used against her, and this has evidently never entered her head despite her professions of love for the child. When she sees other prisoners in the prison, in conditions which are callous and shameful, she feels nothing for them and makes no attempt later to find out what it was they did to 'deserve' this treatment. No, I don’t like this Elisa at all. Is that what Carson intended? To turn her readers against her main protagonist? I don’t think so.
Elisa starts taking self-defence lessons from Hector and Ximenia. She includes the second of her suitors, Conde Tristán in her invitation to the meal where the poisoning took place and learns some interesting snippets from him about the Gate of Life. Indeed, this is why she arrests Lo Chato to ask him what he knows and he demands that she take him with her when she goes to the south to find this gate.
Walking in the palace one night with Hector, her godstone turns to ice (what’s with these last minute warnings?!) seconds before Hector steps in front of her and receives an arrow in his chest. The guards surround her but arrows come in from two directions. How this is happening inside the palace is a mystery. I guess the palace guards suck majorly. When they call for further help, Conde Tristán responds and kills many of the assailants. They take one prisoner for questioning, and Elisa escorts Hector to his room and calls for the doctor. He is bleeding badly and weakened.
Now about Conde Tristán. He seems like a ready-made partner for her, but he's too ready-made for my taste, so I'm wondering what Carson is playing at here. Since Elisa loves Hector, is she going to kill him off now and make Elisa marry the Conde? Or will she end up marrying Hector? Will the Conde die before or after marrying her? Will she appoint the Conde to the open position in the Quorum of Five, or will Lo Chato be granted that position? Tristán is not from the north which is where she's advised to take a husband from. He is not particularly important. He is the Conde of an island group in the south which also happens to be the location of the gate, according to Lo Chato.
I guess we'll have to wait and see, and I hate that! But look at it this way, despite turning me off Elisa, Carson is still telling an interesting - if somewhat improbable - tale with all these assassination attempts and the utter failure of the palace guards. And therein lays another tale. Does this mean that General Luz-Manuel, who is in charge of that guard, is failing in his duty? Or is he the instigator? And given her complete lack of reticence in punishing the entire kitchen staff so unjustly, why has she not demanded the general's resignation for this calamitous series of failures in palace security? Suspension of disbelief is being called into question here! A reader can only forgive so many missteps before the entire story fails, so Carson needs to make good on this contract!
I hate detest and loathe Rae Carson! As soon as I get to bitching about what she's up to, she steps the novel up not one notch, but two! Elisa goes to a Gala (and this after admitting to Hector that she needs to pay more heed to his warnings about her safety) where she's in very close proximity to many strangers, any one of whom could stick her with a poisoned pin. Oh, I guess I'd better explain Hector's rapid recovery, since he's her escort to the Gala dance. Elisa resurrects him from the (near) dead by using her godstone (but fails to offer that service to someone else who is sick. She still doesn't understand how it works, but she is so desperate for Hector to live that she somehow manages to channel power up from the Earth and into him. Okay? Good, let's go to the ball!
She dances with several people, including Rosario and with the Conde Tristán in whom she finds she has a lot in common. But later, when she's walking alone outside in the courtyard, she hears soft talk and giggles from behind some bushes and rather than leave them alone, she sticks her nose in there to find the Conde in a clinch with another guy! Props for introducing a gay character as surreptitiously as she does charmingly. But Elisa is pissed off with him for deceiving her into thinking he was an eligible suitor. That's the first notch.
After the dance, she finds that there's a letter from her sister Alodia, whom she hasn't seen in a year and who wouldn't even come to her coronation, telling Elisa that she needs to find a husband and finding one in Elisa's territory would be good because it would bring the two countries even closer together (yes country! Who was it who let the word 'county' slip by earlier in this novel?! lol! So much for editors.) Alodia mentions Hector by name and asks if he's a suitable catch and as much as it hurts Elisa to do it, she immediately writes back and tells Alodia that he would be perfect for her. That's the second notch. See what I mean? Don't you hate Rae Carson too, now?
After mailing the letter (by pigeon) Elisa goes to bed and cries all night. But the next day she hatches a plan. She calls the Conde, fortunately catching him right before he's had chance to beat a hasty retreat from the palace and her wrath, and she makes a deal with him. She will promote him for the vacant position on the Quorum of five (yeay! That was one of my guesses!) if he will pretend to be her fiancé while she takes a trip down to his territory and looks for this Gate of life - the Zafira (and after that they'll go after the Jumanji, no doubt!). In return, Tristán will have to vote the way she asks him on two occasions, regardless of how he personally feels about the vote. Tristán accepts her terms, and with Elisa in disguise walking behind the royal carriage, and a stand-in inside the carriage, they leave the city and eh ad south. I suspect the so far unidentified woman in the carriage is the one with whom Hector was having so much fun at the Gala dance, but it's noteworthy that it's a woman whose name Elisa doesn't even know, nor cares to ask.
The trip south is harsh, but Elisa enjoys it. The problem is that Hector does not ride in the decoy's carriage nor walks or rides beside it. He's at Elisa's side the whole time, talking to her, and blaring out to anyone with half a brain cell that this is the real queen! They notice that a small group is following them, so she sends Belén to spy on them at night and they quickly determine that Lord Franco is one of the people and they know he's an Invierne assassin.
Rather than send men back there to take that handful of men out, she comes up with this asinine scheme that puts everyone at risk: they will split at the next city and some of them will sneak out by boat, the others, with the decoy, will continue overland. Ximenia is to go with the decoy. Elisa's dumb "reasoning" is that it will be more convincing; that it will give her away if her most trusted lady-in-waiting stays with "the servants" but somehow Carson fails to apply this rationale to Hector himself - her most trusted bodyguard. This makes no sense at all and ends up with her decoy being killed, another victim to her short-sightedness.
The next item on her stupid list comes up when they hear that the assassins which they failed to take out on the road away from any potential collateral damage, are coming to the hotel where they're staying. Instead of waiting in the room and taking him out when he comes to kill her, Elisa's plan is to abandon the hotel, escaping through the sewer to the ocean, where they will row out to meet a ship which may be there tomorrow or which may not be there for a week. As a diversion, Elisa has someone set fire to the hotel and the hell with what lives that takes or what property it destroys. Note here that she justifies this with her scheme to get the power that lies with the Zafira, the whatever-it-is that she's now seeking. Remember this for later.
They set sail on a ship which is owned and operated by Hector's brother Felix. No word on whether his last name is Leiter, or whether he shares an apartment with a guy called Oscar. The test that was spoken of which would be set in their path, turns out to be a hurricane escorted by a tornado, but Elisa's praying gets them through to clear skies and calm waters. She learns that Mara's wound has opened yet again (some wound huh?) and so Elisa finally has the bright idea that if she could fix Hector, she can fix Mara, and she does it successfully. She knows that she is able to channel her power much more easily with practice, yet she rarely practices! When Felix asks if she can help with one of his crew who has a broken leg, she says she cannot - it has to be someone she cares about. Way to diss the crew who just put their lives at risk for you Elisa! The sad fact is that despite having had such an easy time of fixing Mara (with the usual downside of exhaustion afterwards) she doesn't even offer to try to fix the crew. This Elisa gets harder and harder to like. Her entire line of thought at this point is about Hector's proximity and how manly he is and how his muscles ripple. Yeah, this great trilogy is heading into cheap romance territory instead of Zafira territory!
So after a brief exchange with Mara in which Mara hands her the Lady's Shroud - some plant seeds which, if taken regularly, will prevent her from becoming pregnant so she can go at it like a rabbit with Hector if she wants, they find the Island of the Zafira and disembark. Elisa sneaks off with Storm, the Invierne guy, of all people, who also feels the pull of the Zafira, but not as strongly as Elisa. They abandon everyone else because she doesn't want to put them at risk (remember this for later!), and after trekking through the jungle and into a secret tunnel behind a waterfall and up the mountain on the inside and down the other side on the outside into the valley, they meet the gatekeeper, an Invierno of great antiquity. Elisa has learned from Storm that unlike her own people who were apparently brought to this world by the hand of a god, the Invierne people have always been there. This is their planet, and the johnny-come-lately's have evidently trashed the planet since they arrived. The land which Elisa rules wasn't always a desert. It used to be much more lush.
Having successfully navigated all the tests and trials, Elisa is finally granted the power of the Zafira, and Storm replaces the existing guy as the Gatekeeper, bound to the Zafira room with chains and manacles. So she has exactly what she came for. She came for it to save her nation. The trip to get this has cost lives, but what does she do now? She gives it up, frees Storm, and escapes the valley of the Zafira as it collapses around her taking a few godstones with her as she goes. This is why I asked you earlier to remember some things, because Elisa has just betrayed all of them here, and it's going to cost her, but at least Carson gets a third volume out of Elisa's short-sightedness. Hector is pissed off with her for going off alone, especially with the Invierno, but she still cannot say "I love you" despite making it about as clear as it can be made without those three words. They set sail back to the nearest city and discover that Lord Franco is in charge, and he takes Hector and says that if Elisa does not follow voluntarily and give herself up within two months, Hector will die.
Elisa thinks hard and puts out royal decrees left right and center. She sends a request to Lord Hector's father asking that he reappoint Hector as sole heir to Ventierra, and she announces her engagement to Lord Hector. She announces the appointment of Conde Tristán to the Quorum of Five - the same Tristán who failed to prevent Lord Franco from taking over and taking Hector prisoner. She calls on Tristán to raise an army in the south, paying him with a godstone to finance it. She calls on Belén to be her bodyguard in Hector's place. She hands another godstone to Fernando telling him to raise a palace guard. She sends an invitation to Crown Princess Alodia and to Queen Cosmé requesting that they meet for a council of queens in three month's time, and she sets off with Belén, Mara, and Storm for Inverne.
Well this one was harder to read than the first volume. It had many problems, but I am still confident enough in Carson that I want to class this as worthy and read the next vol when it comes out. Then we'll see how she does in tying all this up!
