Queenswood

Description

While the premise of Queenswood promises a high-stakes collision between a noblewoman fleeing an arranged marriage and a faerie prince seeking to save his dying forest, the execution fails to ignite.

Set in twelfth-century Ireland, Queenswood meshes folklore, mythology, and history between the historical world and the faerie realms.

Kathleen Schwab’s prose is undeniably lush, but the flowery descriptions frequently act as a barrier to the plot. The first hundred pages function more as a scenery dump than a narrative, trading active storytelling for navel-gazing internal monologues and heavy backstory. The inciting incident is buried under decorative prose, the rich setting stalling the story with its lack of character agency. Rhiannon and Angus feel like passive vessels for the author’s world-building rather than autonomous individuals driven by the life-and-death stakes the blurb suggests. The late introduction of additional point-of-view characters further diluted the narrative focus, distracting from the central relationship between Rhiannon and Angus just as it needed to solidify.

Great concept, but the pacing and inconsistent logic make it a slow read that fails to satisfy.