Rating: 
Summary: A weaker effort than previous novels
Review: The Witch Queen (Witch's Honour, in the UK) is the last in Jan Siegel's trilogy began in Prospero's Children and continued in The Dragon-Charmer. Numerous characters, history and plot are carried over from the earlier novels, including the main "enemies" of our heroes Fern, Will and more stranger people such as Rattleskin. Once again Fern battles against Morgus and Azmordis. However, it is a complete story in itself, not absolutely requiring you to have read the earlier novels, but this is obviously going to help in order to understand the background of the novel's mythos.Siegel's world is set within ours, in our own time, but it is a world of witches, wizards, goblins and earth-powers which coexist with ordinary and mundane people. The Gifted, or Prospero's children have witch powers derived from the fall of Atlantis. Robert Holdstock, Tim Powers and Charles de Lint handled this kind of thing more successfully, though Siegel's excellent descriptive talents ensure a chill or two as the story develops. The young Witch heroine battling evil obviously has echoes of Buffy the vampire slayer and House-Goblins are rather familiar following Harry Potter's House-Elves, but the material is handled quite well would appeal to the older teenage market, though there is a few minor and mild references to sex. One irritation was the thoroughly middle-classness of major characters who all seem to have smart flats in London, work in PR or The City and who had well-off parents live in large houses in the country. At times it almost seems to be a fantasy version of Bridget Jones. This will attract or repel depending on taste. In all a weaker effort than previous novels, suffering from a little padding midway through, a fault experienced by middle volumes of trilogy's rather than the last; but the finale works quite well, but too tidy.
Rating:
Summary: A disgusting and to a depressing series
Review: When I say "disgusting" here it doesn't mean buckets o' gore or sexual acrobatics. I mean it in it's very literal sense of "distasteful". This isn't a coming of age story. It's not a story of courage, physical or moral. It's not a story I'd ever let my daughters read. It's a story about giving up, about powerlessness, about self-abnegation and denial and fear of one's own adulthood. At every turn in the series, and one really must take the three books as a whole, the main character goes from joylessness to sorrow to emptiness. She runs constantly from her magical inner self. She only really touches it in moments of danger always ends up poorer in spirit from it. Her power brings her no joy, only pain to herself and danger to those close to her. Beauty is for her brother the artist. Love and sex are for her friend. Wisdom is for the burned-out hulk of a wizard who makes occasional appearances. None of it is for her. Love? She tries to turn off her sexuality and her capacity for love by blunting them against an unsuitable match in the first third of the trilogy. Every time she comes close it ends in betrayal, loss and pain. In the end she almost finds a suitable man only to give him up along with everything else (literally). Her relation with the one woman who actually teaches her magic is equal parts abuse, rape, enslavement and vengeance. Power? I'm not a fan of what Norman Spinrad calls "Emperor of Everything" stories, but if fantasy is to teach us anything it is that there is a capacity for nobility, transcendence and magic in each of us even if the power is only that of self-realization. Poor Fern reaches none of these. The series is a constant stream of pain, loss and sacrifice as our protagonist (I hesitate to call her heroine) tries desperatley for normalcy and fails and tries for magic only to be burned. In the end, having sacrificed love, career, power, friendship, beauty, and everything else potentially good or uplifting in her life she is confronted with a choice of the destruction of everything she still holds dear or the last draining out of what she is and ever was. It is a depressing dilemma offering nothing but defeat any way you look at it. In that, at least, the author does not disappoint. She delivers defeat and self denial in the same degree that she did in about a thousand pages of narrative. It's a shame that Jan Siegel is such a good writer. If she couldn't keep you turning the pages the reader would have dropped the books early on and not watched the series grind to its gray, deadening conclusion. It is definitely NOT a story for girls or young women. The message is "Avoid your power. Fight growth and life at every choice because they will only bring pain. In the end your attempts will bring you quite literally to nothing. If you're really fortunate you can have a dull, comfortless but relatively pain-free existence. Otherwise you will have to sacrifice yourself totally for the benefit of others more worthy than you." One can only hope that Siegel will turn her considerable talents in a more worthy direction.
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