Sakura of DOOM

Queen Elizabeth has been on the throne for a couple of decades, but no one knows that some of her success comes from a pact made with another queen—Invidiana, queen of faerie England. Soon, Michael Deven, a member of her court, and Lune, an out-of-favor lady from Invidiana's court, are working to find out exactly what binds the two queens together and why.

I enjoyed this a lot. It's got court politics and intrigue like whoa, but written in such a manner that it's very understandable to me while still being believably politic-y. I particularly liked learning more and more about Lune as we learned more and more about Faerie. And though I'm mostly tired of books about Faerie/fairies/the Fae/Sidhe/etc., the setting and politics of this were interesting enough to keep me engaged. It does have many of the standard Faerie trappings—fear of church bells, glamour, and etc.—and though Brennan doesn't deconstruct them, there are enough twists to entertain.

And apparently there's room for two Elizabethan books about Faerie, as this one reads very, very differently from The Perilous Gard.

I am still not quite sure what to make of the role Christianity plays. On the one hand, it's hard to have Faerie without a mention of church bells or teinds to hell. On the other, I'm not quite sure I fully bought the religious aspects, and whenever I read these books, I always wonder about other parts of the world and other religions and such. I mean, in the author's notes, Brennan clearly wants to limit the book to a particular time period and region, and I like the sense of Faerie scattered about Europe with different courts and such—faerie politics works very much like inter-country politics in Elizabethan England. Possibly I am just thinking too much about it.

Anyway, it's an engaging read.

Links:
- yhlee's review
- cofax7's review
- rushthatspeak's review