Book: The Queen of Days
Author: Greta Kelly
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Year: 2023
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “For Balthazar and his family of thieves, stealing a statue during the annual celebration of the god Karan’s was just a good bit of fun…or a way to stick it to the governor who murdered his parents. And yeah, the small fortune in reward doesn’t hurt – even if his boss also hired the mysterious Queen of Days to join the crew as “the weapon of last resort…”
Whatever that means.
But Bal doesn’t know the ceremony isn’t simply the empty words and dusty tradition; it’s true magic. The kind of magic that rips open a portal for the god himself. Only the idol that Karan’s planned on using for a body now lies broken at the Queen of Days’ feet. And half of it is missing.
With the aid of a lovable brawler, a society lady turned bomb maker, a disgraced soldier, and a time-eating demon, Bal must hunt down the missing half of the statue if he has any hope of earning his money, keeping his crew alive…and perhaps even saving all of humanity. But as his journey sends him racing through the city – and across realities – he discovers that doing all this might just doom the city.

The city be damned. It’s time to kill a god.”

Review : The Queen of Days bounces between two points of view; Balthazar (Bal), the leader of a crew of thieves called the Talion gang; and Tassel Janae (Tass), aka The Queen of Days. Bal and his crew have been commissioned by a mysterious patron for what’s supposed to be a simple smash and grab at a largely symbolic ceremony of ruling class elites within Bal’s home city of Cothis. We learn early on that Bal and the members of the Talion gang are not only related to each other, some through illegitimate affairs on Bal’s father’s behalf, but were once the children of the previous ruling elite of Cothis themselves – before Bal’s family was ousted (and killed) by the members of the city for a superstitious belief that they had angered the god of water, Karanis. Several years of drought will do that.

Though the Talion gang are a crew of experienced thieves with years of work under their belts, their patron has a singular request : they must hire and work with the Queen of Days, a masked mercenary with a reputation that precedes her. She’s rumored to be able to defy the laws of nature, to have extraordinary powers, and worst of all, to be a demon of the Nethersphere. She comes to the Talion gang rather mysteriously herself, all but proving the rumors true and creating fear and suspicion within the gang, particularly when she asks for payment in days off their lives rather than in coin. As Bal, Tass, and the rest of the crew work to layout a plan, they become increasingly fractured and disorganized and it takes the remainder of the book to bring them back together into a family unity again.

Spoilers Ahead

As the crew attempts their simple robbery (with a huge payout, mind you), they almost immediately come to find it isn’t quite as simple as they were promised. When the symbolic ceremony turns anything but, Tass takes matters into her own hands and smashes the statuette they were commissioned to steal. Realizing that the ceremony was designed to draw down the god Karanis from the Nethersphere, Tass acts without explanation, saving the youngest member of the Talion gang, Bal’s sister Mira, and escaping the ceremony. When Karanis arrives and finds his vessel destroyed, he takes possession of the current city’s ruler (and Bal’s father’s usurper) Paasch – a move that will not allow Karanis to exist within this world for long. He must find the statue, it must be restored, or he will wreak unstable and unmeasurable damage upon the world. What ensues is about 300 pages of Bal, Tass, and the crew working to figure out what’s really going on, where the pieces of the statue may have ended up, and how they can save themselves in the process.

I chose to give TQOD 3 stars because I found this book to be quite long and difficult to get through. I don’t actually mind an almost 400 page book, I enjoy a lengthy tale, particularly if it’s something I can’t stop thinking about, but that’s exactly the problem I had with this one. I’ve often said that it doesn’t take quality writing to create a compelling story, there have been many books I’ve found lacking when it came quality that kept me turning pages simply because I couldn’t stop thinking about what was going to happen. Unfortunately, TQOD didn’t hit the mark for me. I found myself distinctly disconnected from the characters, I would put the book down and easily walk away, I found myself thinking of other things when I was reading and often had to go back and reread passages in order to figure out what was happening because I was so lacking connection. There were about 100 pages right at the end that found me turning pages to see what was going to happen, but sadly the 200 something pages that preceded it were so uninteresting enough that the final 100 weren’t enough to make me want to give this book a higher rating.

I will say, it was written quite well and utilized a trope many people thoroughly enjoy : found family. I found the world building to be fair, but not great, as I had a lot of unanswered questions about the world Kelly created. It didn’t help that I was so disconnected from the story, I think had I found more connection with the characters I might have found more connection with the world, but there still remain many unanswered questions about the world, what it looks like, and how it interacts with the characters, and why it does the way it does – for example, Kelly mentions a flood mythology that exists within this world, much like exists within our world. I have questions. Fortunately for readers, TQOD is very clearly the first of at least two books so there will be time and room for questions to be answered, but that does rely on readers finding their own connections that will compel them to continue reading, and of that I’m not sure they will.

Advice : If you enjoy fantasy, the found family trope, and don’t mind reading several hundred pages, you just might like this one. I personally found it lengthy and difficult to get through, but if you like a series, enjoy thievery and magic and gods who aren’t really gods, I think this would be worth the time.