Three Dark Crowns

Before we begin, I should probably disclose how I got this book. While I was not in any way paid to promote this book on my blog, I did receive it for free while on a job interview, and am now employed by the same company that does the PR for Three Dark Crowns.

Anyway, onto the good stuff.

When Crystal told me to go ahead and pick a book out of their backstock for the plane ride home, I was delighted to sift through the plethora of titles on their rolling shelves. After looking through them all, Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake caught my eye.

I had seen it on the shelves at Barnes & Noble, in my early days getting it mixed up with the Throne of Glass series and the Red Queen series. I had read the back, and always meant to read it... along with nearly 100 other titles in the store.

The premise is that in every generation, the queen gives birth to triplets, all girls. At a young age, they are separated and sent to live with those with the same gifts as them. At sixteen, they have a year to kill off the other two, using their gifts. The one who remains standing becomes queen. In this generation, something is not quite right. Mirabella, the elemental, has won the favor of the Temple, and they have backed her completely to be queen. Such favoritism has never been established before. Meanwhile, her sisters Katherine, the poisoner, and Arsinoe, the naturalist, are not as gifted as they let the world believe.

It was an impossibly fast read. Despite it's length at nearly 400 pages, I was finished reading long before my plane landed back in Chicago, and I had only started once I sat down at the airport. With alternating perspectives, it was impossible for the story to get slow, but the three protagonists and the people around them were so drastically different that it was easy to follow who was who, something I find many fantastical stories fail to do.

Once again, I found the last second plot twist predictable (I guessed it before I even got on the plane), but how it was revealed was still thrilling. By waiting until the absolute last page to reveal the twist, Blake set us up perfectly for a sequel. I know that I, personally, am chomping at the bit to find out how everything plays out, and will try to squeeze in time to read One Dark Throne, which comes out September 19th.

The Future of This Blog

So. As you may have seen in a previous blog post, I got a job at a publishing company. A year after finishing publishing school, after months of working in a bookstore and working for free for a magazine, I finally got myself a big-girl job.

But what does that mean for my blog?

The short answer: I don't know.

I'm going to be reading a lot for this job, but it'll be manuscripts and successive versions of them until they are ready to go. My first read will probably be over a year before they're published. I don't know how much I'll want to read for pleasure when so much of my job is reading. And will I even be able to talk about the books I'm working on? My guess is yes, but in a limited capacity until they're print-ready, and even then, probably only enough to give it hype.

Sure, I'll be learning way more about the publishing industry. But I'm going to also be writing blog posts about that for the company blog.

I want to keep up this blog, because I've really loved doing it. I've been trying to post every 6-8 days for the last few months, and it's been going really well. I'm just not sure how able I'll be to continue generating content at the same rate.

Hopefully, I'll just slow down. Maybe post something every 10-12 days. Maybe shift subjects a little (I mean, how many posts have I written about LIW? I could go back to that...) but I promise nothing.