The Queen’s Alliance Book Review

The Queen's Alliance by Jessica Gleave
Series: Kingdoms of the Ocean #1
Published by Jessica Gleave Genres: Romance
Format: eBook
Goodreads

Her kingdom on the brink of war. His kingdom can give her the army she needs. The price—her hand in marriage.
Evelda has shown no emotion since the death of her parents. Forced to become a queen at a young age, Evelda believes she needs to be strong, fearless, and as impassive as stone.
When the threat of war looms, Evelda turns to her neighboring kingdom, to forge a marital alliance with Thaine the Son of the Pacific Ocean.
The plan—to marry for the sake of her kingdom. Evelda doesn’t have time for love.
Until she meets Thaine.
Who may be the only merperson to get Evelda to show her true self.
But there’s nothing simple about negotiating marriage alliances. There’s a lot more occurring beneath the surface.And maybe this could mean the undoing of them all…
The Queen’s Alliance is the start to the Kingdoms of the Ocean series. A secret world far below the water’s surface. Where the merpeople, not only navigate the perils of life under the sea but also of love.

Finding things to read at the minute has become a little bit of a mystery, but usually some cheesy romance is an automatic hit. That’s what I wanted going into The Queen’s Alliance and unfortunately there was just a lot missing and going on that made this story a little frustrating to read. What I will say was that it was a quick read and I found that although it wasn’t my favourite books, I definitely didn’t find it hard to pick up and read.

Characters in The Queen’s Alliance

Throughout The Queen’s Alliance we follow Evelda as she readies the Atlantic Ocean kingdom for war. The story centres around her attempting to negotiate a marital agreement with another ocean kingdom and everything that ensues after their meeting. I struggled with Evelda’s interactions with not only the other kingdom but with her own family and advisors. Everything was wooden and hard to read, there was no emotion and although this was played off as a trauma response it fell flat and made her character two dimensional.

Insta-love plays a part throughout this story and although not my favourite I can usually get on board if something builds from there. But again there was no discernible difference between the interactions so it didn’t make a huge amount of sense for their relationship to grow into what it did. Thaine frustrated me throughout and his complete lack of backbone made everything seem so much harder than it had to be.

Bad Bits in The Queen’s Alliance

For me the bad bits in this book overshadowed some of the good bits and I think that’s because there was essentially two stories attempting to be told in this one book. Everything especially Darren (random human) and Charisa’s (queen’s little sister) interactions were rushed and made little sense until the very end. The Queen’s Alliance struggled to hold my attention because not a lot happens and the things that do unfortunately are repetitive and confusing.

I would have loved for there to have been more of a focus on the politics and for there to be moments of romance sprinkled within. I think the female characters within the storyline deserved more than what they got, and it definitely needed another 100ish pages to build on the intrigue and stories hinted at all the way through.

Good Bits

Although I have been quite negative about this book, I couldn’t put it down and read it within the day. There was something captivating about the characters and the setting. I haven’t read a huge amount of mermaid fiction and from that aspect The Queen’s Alliance wasn’t a bad pick. There was so much potential within this book I feel like if it had been polished just that little bit it would have been a more well-rounded experience.

What now?

This is the first book in a series, but I’m not feeling a massive urge to go and pick the other ones up unfortunately. I have a huge number of books to catch up on and read, so I’m not sure I’m going to waste my time on this one.

Have you read this one? What did you think? Was the sequel worth the read? Let me know!