Kill the Queen, Jennifer Estep
Jennifer Estep’s Kill the Queen is joyfully tropetastic: after Lady Everleigh witnesses the massacre of everyone who stands near to the throne before her, except one traitor, she escapes due to her hidden magic and plans to disappear, becoming just plain old Evie, despite her promise to the previous queen to take back the throne. She falls in with a group of gladiators and ends up training as a gladiator herself, not noticing the parallel with the fact that the first queen of her bloodline rose to the throne via combat as a gladiator. Throughout the book, she discovers that skills she learned as the seventeenth in line to the throne are useful — things that dealt with certain customs that nobody more important had the time to cater to, like baking a particular kind of pie and learning fiendishly complex dance steps.
It continues in that vein throughout: it’s readable, and fairly well-paced, and it has all the obligatory spices like a fairly obvious deeper plot, and a hate-to-love romance. It’s basically brain candy, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I didn’t love it, and I’m not sure if I’m going to bother reading the second book or not, but it was fun.
All the plots that interest me seem to descend into romance and it’s frustrating trying to find new series without it!
I wouldn’t say it “descends” into romance, since I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad about romance, and I don’t think the romance is the main feature of the story. It’s just one of the ingredients.
Agreed, nothing too phenomenal but I thought it was good fun.
Yeah — I’d probably read the sequel eagerly enough if I wasn’t trying to focus on my backlog!