Product Description

In Ethrea, Rhian sits upon a precarious throne. Defiant noblemen who won't accept her rule threaten the stability of her kingdom, Zandakar, a man she thought was her friend, has been revealed as the son of a woman sworn to destroy her and her husband, King Alasdair, is increasingly unsure of her love. Rhian's most grave problem, however, lay outside the borders of her realm. The trading nations refuse to believe Mijak is a threat and promise reprisals if she dares to protect her realm. If she cannot unite the warring factions within her land, a move again Mijak might prove the end of her reign. Which is exactly what the empress of Mijak has planned...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32238 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 704 pages

About the Author
Karen Miller was born in Vancouver, Canada, and came to Australia with her family when she was two. Apart from a two year stint in the UK after graduating she's lived around Sydney ever since. She has held a variety of interesting jobs and fell in love with speculative fiction at primary school.

Customer Reviews

This is where I lost interest
I gave a valiant effort in that I actually finished the first 2 books in the series. But, alas, this book just completely lost me. The originality of the first 2 books went out the window with the setting and troubles of this struggling heir to a throne camped by malicious noblemen and clergy, and the issue with female sole ruler etc. It just got boring. It is, I suppose, a daring prospect for any author to so completely turn the aspect of a trilogy, not only as protagonists goes, but geographically as well, and I felt like I was reading a book which should have been the first, in its own trilogy, or series tbh. - I would give the first 2 books a positive go ahead, but this one, tbh, lost me quite early on.

Good plot, but would have been better as two books
A standard fantasy plot of (in this case a girl) rising from a harsh poor living to become empress introduces us in the first book (Empress) to a well-plotted clever trilogy. The second book sees the introduction of another, very different civilisation in the same world and this last book is about the clash of those civilisations. There are intriguing sub-plots about the interaction of some of the characters and Karen Millen cleverly highlights how religions can worship gods in different ways but may actually be connecting to the same god.
Like her first books this series shows good imagination and is well written. My only caveat is that, like her first novels, this should have been 2 books rather than 3. The second and third are padded with endless arguments between Rhian/Alasdair and Ursa/dexterity that get a bit tedious and do not add much to the plot.

And so it ends
I think, after the massive set up at the end of the previous book, this finale was always in danger of being anti-climatic.

To Karen Miller's credit, however, the effect of this is minimal. The pace keeps up, there are various twists and turns which maintain suspense and keep the page turning. Questions of how the first book in the series could concentrate solely on such a wretched character as Hekat are answered, and everything comes to a satisfying conclusion. The relationships between the characters simmer nicely and feel real, there's no easy or 'too neat' conclusions to anything yet the strands of the previous books are all tied up nicely. Even the more evil of the characters are given a little depth.

My gripes are minor - I do feel that at the end of the book, once the big climax is done the rush to put all the emotional strands in place is done a little too quickly (particularly with one pair of characters who I won't name for fear of spoiling). The anti-climatic effect I mentioned does rear its head a little, though as I say it is minimal.

All in all - a tidy but engaging wrap up to the trilogy, job well done.