Queen of Coin and Whispers by Helen Corcoran — book review

Queen of Coin and Whispers is a very generic YA fantasy novel. While it is not necessarily badly written, its story, setting, and characters are both forgettable and lacklustre.

What initially drew me to Queen of Coin and Whispers was its F/F romance. Once I began reading this book I quickly realised that the queer romance was the only thing that makes this story somewhat more interesting than your usual YA fantasy. The world-building is poorly rendered, the plot, as such, consisted in a succession of cliché after cliché, and most disappointing of all is the romance, which severely lacked chemistry.

The World-building/Setting
The setting is a generic fantasy one. There is an attempt to make this world different by dividing social classes into steps (barons are third steps, while lord and ladies are sixth and seventh steps). This whole step system was wholly unnecessary as the characters already have titles, and readers could therefore workout who sits where on the social hierarchy. The rest (clothes, customs, architecture, the kingdom’s history) is barely hinted at. The country’s attitude towards same-sex relationships is briefly hinted at towards the beginning, and later on we discover that same-sex marriages are legal, but we don’t really know more details than that (when this happened, whether homophobia still occurs, etc). We are told that Edar, the country Lia rules, is no longer religious, but we don’t get much more information beyond that. What sort of religion? What about Edar’s myths and or lore?
Most of the story takes place in inside Edar’s royal palace, and you would think that we would get an extensive history of it (when it was constructed, its dimension/style) but we don’t. We know that nobles live in apartments inside the palace, but we don’t really know how they are set out (on more than one floor?).

The Story
Like many YA books out there this book stars a newly crowned queen who has to assert her power. She decides to make Xania into her spymaster. There is gossip, some drama between different factions, an assassination attempt or two, and some foreign princes. As the queen Lia has to marry in order to have an heir. Lia and Xania fall in love. That’s sort of it.

The Characters
Lia: most characters describe her as an idealist…so I guess we could say she is that. Other than that nothing about her stood out.
Xania: much is made about her…she is Lia’s Whispers, aka her spy, and should therefore be feared by the court…to me however she was way way way too green to be a convincing spymaster. She is seventeen, she must have only recently started working at the palace’s treasury, and that would hardly make her well-versed into the art of spying. When she describes those instances in which she extrapolates informations from others she is so self-dramatising. She goes on about how dangerous she is…and for some reason she has learnt self-defence even if she was raised at the palace…I just wasn’t convinced by her character.
Other characters: they are either good or bad, but most of all they are forgettable.

The Writing
Lia and Xania have first person narrations…and they sound exactly the same. There were a lot of unnecessary attempts at making them sound edgy (so we have many metaphors involving thorns and blades). Other than that the writing was all-right, nothing too elaborate.

Final Verdict
I just didn’t feel the chemistry between the two main characters. The story was predictable, the setting was barely rendered, and the writing was unremarkable. All in all, I would not recommend this. If you are looking for a satisfying F/F YA fantasy novel I would suggest Marie Rutkoski’s The Midnight Lie.

My rating: ★★✰✰✰ 2 stars

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