Book Review: Cold Queen by K Webster

Cold Queen by K. Webster
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Cold Queen...I'm left torn with this book.

It has the captor/captive trope between King Bloodsun and Queen Whitestone, which made me uncomfortable, but at the same time, I kinda understood why she let herself be captive to a man who turns around and made her much better after pulling the wool from her eyes thanks to King Bloodsun and him being the Truth Seeker, reminding me of Nevada Baylor from the Hidden Inventory series. But the way Queen Elzira was treated throughout her reign, letting people she knows poison her throughout her entire reign without her knowing, was sad to me. I was waiting for her to say something to someone, but she didn't and just let the poisoning happen to her, slowly dying and not even knowing. Even when she put her sister Yanna first, she didn't even know that Yanna was jealous and poisoning her, just like her mother did to Elzira's mother, which was such crap, but then I got over it.

King Bloodsun just...to me, was too pushy, and when he realized what was going on, he decided to calm himself down and started finding the truth about why Elzira was dying. And once he figured that out, that's when he started weeding them out, even keeping Yanna away from Elzira, even though he said he wanted to marry her. But once he started weeding everyone that was poisoning her and slowly killing her, that's when he turned around and started taking care of her, like feeding her, setting the fires, and realizing that there was no such thing as a spore in the fires, he heats up her bath water after realizing that it was cold (something her sister ordered, secretly) and he also noticed how Cavon, a warrior and a right-hand of Elzira, seemed to look at her as if he was still in love with her.

How King Bloodsun and Queen Elzira got together was...alright, I guess. Nothing to run home and tell Mama about. The spice was good, I'll admit, but the way King Bloodsun talked to both Yanna and Elzira made me uncomfortable, and I wanted to DNF this book immediately. But I kept on going, and I'm glad that I did because seeing the change Elzira made from being a sickly queen to a married woman who has finally found herself thanks to her new captor/husband was fun to read and understand completely. I liked that she didn't stay at home because she was pregnant, she went ahead with her new husband and saved more women and young children who were being used and also being food to some terrible men, and to use Diamondblades was a pretty good idea to use and to give a character like Elzira.

Since this is a spicy retelling, I think it's alright. Nothing to get excited about it. The whole captor/captive trope just turned me off from the book and I did enjoy the writing very much.

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