The Hemlock Queen by Hannah Whitten is a fantasy romance and the second book in the Nightshade Crown series (3.5/5 stars)

The Hemlock Queen by Hannah Whitten is a fantasy romance and the second book in the Nightshade Crown series.

I borrowed the audiobook from my local library. Emily Ellet is the narrator and overall I think she does a good job. Occasionally she talks way quieter in one character voice than another in the same conversation, and it made it a little hard for me to parse sometimes.

I liked the first book in this series, The Foxglove King okay. I actually had a pretty similar reading experience with both books so far. The beginning is a lot of vibes and info dumps, but then I got pretty invested throughout the back half of the book. That being said, this one has a bit of middle book syndrome and in the first 30% I honestly thought about DNFing. I’m glad I didn’t, though.

Thankfully, the casual queerness continues from the first book, which I love to see. Our main character, Lore, was raised by a lesbian couple, many characters appear to be sexually fluid, and one of the gods in the pantheon is nonbinary and is referenced with they/them pronouns.

The love triangle is still a big triangle, here. It didn’t fully land for me in the first book, but after this one I’m hopeful that my OT3 will eventually come to be. There are a lot of hints about it, so I’m crossing my fingers.

I particularly enjoy the magic system here: the duality between Mortem, death magic, and Spiritum, life magic. There’s also elemental magic but for Reasons it’s not as prevalent as the life and death magics. We learn a lot about how the current pantheon of gods came about in this installment.

CW: violence, gaslighting, domestic abuse

I received a copy of this book to review. Thank you to Orbit Books for the complimentary advanced reader copy. All opinions contained herein are my own.

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The Nightshade Crown trilogy includes:

• The Foxglove King
• The Hemlock Queen
• The Nightshade God