Highlights

~fantasy terms that don’t mean what they usually mean
~uh oh, new witches!
~the Folk are here
~gotta wake the sleeper
~a truly adorable animal companion

:this review contains spoilers for The Buried and The Bound!:

I really enjoyed the first book in this trilogy, The Buried and The Bound, but I think this sequel succumbed to Middle Book Syndrome.

The thing is, it’s still a very easy, enjoyable read that doesn’t flinch away from interesting, sometimes darker themes. The prose that elevated Buried & Boundruns like cool, clear water through Summer Queen, smooth and silken. And the characters continue to be fabulous; they all get to develop in Summer Queen, moving a few steps along in their evolution. For Aziza, it’s the beginning of learning what her hedewitchery can do and how it can be used to greatest effect; Tristan is becoming more confident and whole within himself, finding a home and accepting that he’s not the person Leo fell in love with before; and Leo wrestles with being the lone ‘normal human’ in the coven and finding ways to carry his own weight (even though Aziza and Tristan don’t see things that way at ALL).

But most of the plot of Summer Queen was – I don’t want to call it a waste of time…except that it kind of was? Everything the coven went through was for nothing in the end – it allowed each of them to learn more about their abilities, but it was pretty literally one lesson for each character. If the whole point of the book was to make sure the teens got these lessons, then…surely that could have been arranged WITHOUT the whole Hunt quest? Which was one of those travelling from here to there and back again OOPS other events made our quest invalid, actually things. Which I am not at all fond of.

And quite a lot of the plot hinged on a few leaps of logic that didn’t make sense to me. For instance, Leo becomes convinced that his lost true love was taken as a servant by the Folk – but he has absolutely no evidence of that! The curse was that his true love would be ‘taken’ from him, but how he goes from that to ‘the Summer Court has my true love!’ I have no clue. (To say nothing of: even if we accept the Folk might have taken this person…the Summer Court is far from the only court! Why do you think your person would be here specifically?)

There was a frustrating amount of things going unexplained – for example, the big quest Leo and the others have to go on? There’s a sort of superficial reason for it – the sleeping king needs a potion – but I didn’t understand at all why it had to be this water, why the whole court didn’t just move next to the lake, why there had to be a Hunt at all. And the creature they were hunting what IS it, really? They called it a undine, sure, but that clearly doesn’t mean what it usually means, and we never got Hassan’s take on it. The coven reaches it, scoops up some of its water, and leaves, and the whole thing was very…underwhelming and hand-wavey?

We got to see a bit more of this world, and I appreciated meeting and learning about more witches, since Aziza has been very isolated from the human magical community, which means Tristan and Leo are as well. But those new characters, that sense of the worldbuilding expanding, was all unimportant to the story of this book, and was clearly just laying groundwork for Events in book three.

I really feel like we could have skipped this book entirely; kept a few pieces here and there, but scrapped about 95% of the story. We didn’t need the quest. We barely needed the Folk. This whole book could have been reduced down to a couple of chapters in a book full of actual plot-moving stuff, and I wish it had been.

So…in a weird way, a lovely read, because of the wonderful writing. But also a frustrating read. I loved seeing the three MCs learning more about their abilities, and about themselves; I loved the new ‘animal companion’ we’ve gained and hope it sticks around for the next book. But virtually none of the story was necessary, and what wasn’t necessary wasn’t really that fun or interesting.

I’m not sure whether I’ll read the next, and final, book. Maybe? Trilogies with Middle Book Syndrome usually pull it back together for book three, right?

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