1533 Kindle pages over 8 days… only to leave me thinking- ‘I should have quit while I was ahead’ and yet something made me keep reading, something made me interested enough…so it couldn’t have all been bad… and it wasn’t… Even though my ratings for each book gradually lowered, I still believe the series is solid… for a reader who isn’t as fussy and impatient as me. 

So… if you haven’t read the series yet, you best stop reading now because there will (probably) be SPOILERS… I simply can’t share my thoughts here without including some things from the story so consider yourselves warned!

The Queen of the Tearling was a 4 star read for me. It started strong, it kept my interest and there was tons happening. The intrigue excited me… Kelsea, her step-parents, her mother… What the hell was going on there, you know? The whole people trafficking treaty… My, that was some serious business and issue for a young Queen to sort out. However, there were some awkward moments… I get it, and I remember being 19… hormones galore, eh?! So, while I liked Kelsea’s stubbornness to prove herself (which she did well) I found her ‘weak’ moments, while human, quite out of place? And then there was the scene where the dark thing visits the Red Queen, her nipples were mentioned 2-3 times and I was like- well, what does that have to do with anything? I don’t bloody well care about her nipples! I get it, Dark Thing is hot times infinity and he’s seductive but the description of the scene, of the Red Queen feeling the effects of a carmer could have been delivered in more ways that just mentioning nipples. Just felt awkward.

I actually did enjoy this book a lot… I enjoyed the Queen’s Guard members… Mace, my all time favorite! Forever and ever and ever! What a strong, intriguing character! Naturally I was excited to start reading book 2 straight away…

The Invasion of the Tearling is when things got meh for me pretty quick. Why? Because… Lily’s chapters felt like a major distraction for me. I wanted to just read about the Glynn Queen, her Guards, the Red Queen and Thorne, the likes… Noooo… let’s go back in time… domestic violence, disgusting rape scene which made no bloody sense to me, no clues as to who these people are and how they are connected to the Glynn Queen until later on- all of this made me restless and moody. Yes, yes, impatient me… but seriously… I was bamboozled… there was tons about to happen in the Tear and yet we’re hopping around in some other timeline? The fact that while we’re getting acquainted with the history before the Crossing and the birthstory of Tear, Kelsea really had no role in Book 2. Yeah, she overturns the NEAR invasion but for most of the time she was aimlessly wandering around her castle stuck in her visions… After all my moaning here I have to admit, Lily’s world was crazy. I liked the whole dystopianness (?) of it and yet, I just didn’t care.. I wanted to go back to the Queen’s Guard, to the warfront and to the ‘current’ issues at hand in Tear. My rating: 3 stars 

The Fate of the Tearling was meant to be the saving grace of the series for me. And you wanna know what ruined it all for me? The freaking ending!  I physically made myself stay awake long into the night (on a work night, mind) to come to the awesome finale only to be rewarded a long round-about way with the plot progression, a twist regarding Kelsea’s mother (which in the grand scheme of things was totally pointless) and an ending that made me look at my husband and say: “1500 something pages for an ending like this? You’ve got to me f*cking kidding me!” and here’s my disclaimer- this storyline and its progression simply wasn’t my cup of tea. End of. It left me totally unsatisfied and rather than feeling like every character came a full circle, I was thrown for one of those endings that’s probably meant to be cool and modern and fresh and unique and different. Yes, it totally fits the book and the alternate timeline thing, but jaysus! So, that leaves me with why I rated 2 stars to the final book… in one word? It felt anticlimactic! There were probably many ways Kelsea’s story could have ended but that conclusion was just balls! I expected a powerful action scene in between the Red Queen and the Queen of Spades, with or without Row’s sapphire influence. After 1400 something pages I had the impression the Red Queen was a force to be reckoned with only to have her succumb like a weakling. One could argue: ‘What about her childhood? That explains…” Yeah, sure… For me? No! I felt cheated… it didn’t feel like a plot twist, I simply felt cheated out of some epic scenes.

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It has only been a week since I finished the last page of the story and if I think of each book individually I can’t really remember much about any of them which makes me think the storyline was stretched to the very last…  a lot of inbetween padding that could have probably been wrapped up a bit more efficiently… but that’s just me, hey!

So, there you have it… I’m Queen Fussypussy the Freaking Third! Overall rating for the series: 3 stars.