Cruel Crown: Two Red Queen Novellas

Queen song was great, Steel scars was terrible, far too technical with the codes. It made the story very hard to listen to and make sense of.

Both of these short stories were a nice addition to the Red Queen series.

I enjoyed finding out more about Queen Coriane in the Queen Song story, including how she met King Tiberias and how she died. The character of Coriane I didn’t fall in love with as much as I would have liked to, she spent a lot of time doubting herself and complaining about being alone in the beginning. The only issue I had with this story was that it didn’t answer the question on who actually killed her, if anything it made it even more questionable. As an individual story I would rate this a 3.5/5 as I would have liked a bit more detail in it.

Steel Scars tells us more about Farley and what she was doing before and overlaps with the Red Queen story. However I didn’t really have any interest in this story at all, it didn’t hook me in and I didn’t feel the need to really know this story. Farley came across in this rather a boring character where as in the Red Queen and Glass Sword I found her to be quite interesting.

Also in this story there was a lot of decoded messages that were being sent between people in the Scarlet Guard, regarding the mission Farley was on. To be honest I had no clue what any of them meant, with code names being used as well as real names it was hard to keep track on what they were talking about.

As an individual story I would rate this with just managing to get a 3/5. I managed to read through this so it was not bad enough for me to force myself to read but this probably was helped by the fact it was only about 100 pages.

Overall I enjoyed the first story but would have much preferred an extended version of Queen Story or a story on another character such as Shade rather than the Farley story in Steel Scars. Together as one book I have given this a 3 stars.

it's all way 's good to have a prequel to get into the back story of the characters but it was a little too short for me and felt like it was bulked out with chapters from the Glass sword which I've already listened to. That said I love this collection and can't wait for the 3rd and understand there is going to be a movie which will be amazing if it has the right production team.