Rating: 
Summary: Darkly enchanting.
Review: For those of you who are tired of the standard sweetness and light that invades much of today's literature, I most heartily reccommend Anne Bishop's Black Jewels trilogy. Queen of the Darkness, the final installment of this midnight tapestry brings the story of Witch, and her Dreamers, to a close. Unlike most of the books that are now on the shelves, Bishop has drawn characters and places from modern mythology to bring this storyline to a personal place for many people. This is a story of honor and blood, and the fine line that divides necessity and cruelty, love and desire, life and death. Daughter of the Blood, Heir to the Shadows, and now Queen of the Darkness. Truely a set to grace any personal library.
Rating:
Summary: An amazing conclusion...
Review: I have never finished a book in such a short time, oh my gods this was wonderful! I don't want to spoil too much here, though I will say towards the end you definately want to have tissues around if you're a sap like me. A bittersweet happy ending, DEFINATELY was worth the wait!
Rating:
Summary: Bishop brings dark fantasy to a whole new light.
Review: Wonderful. For month's I've waited for the release of this title, and now that I've read it I can only sing it's praises. Ms. Bishop has once again demonstrated her ability to bring the noble, darker side of human nature to the fore. This piece is a masterwork, filled with humor and magic. But always reminding the readers that underneath it all lies a brilliantly dark and violent world. Thank you Anne Bishop, for granting us all a look into this haunting world of your imagination. It is truly a Dream made Paper.
Rating: 
Summary: Good except for the ending...
Review: As many have already commented, this book is overall a great read with engaging plotline, complex characters (except for the bad guys, they are a little two-dimensional) and a great atmosphere. Unfortunately, the ending seems rushed and contrived leaving at least this reader feeling alittle wanting. WARNING : spoiler ahead, if you haven't read the book, skip the rest In fact, I wonder if the ending might have been an addendum, that is the publisher wanted a happy ending, so let's just add a couple of short chapters and bring Janelle back from the dead. It's not that I have any problem with a happy ending but there just isn't enough material there to make it consistent with the rest of the novel. What I thought would have worked better, is to have Janelle survive but completely stripped of her craft, basically the same as what she had done to Alexander. This will provide a wonderful opportunity to work out a few scenes on how the various characters cope with this development and rally to support Janelle as the Queen still (as she had hinted earlier that one dopesn't need to be a Witch to be a Queen). Perhaps that is how Anne Bishop has meant to write the ending but it certainly didn't come across as such and it was a sad miss for a great series.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent ending to an excellent trilogy!
Review: I've just finished Queen of the Darkness. All I have to say is...wow.
This is the third book of the Black Jewels Trilogy and it is excellent. So as not to give up too much of the plot think: honor, love, ambition, anger and sacrifice. It sounds trite, doesn't it? But in this book, in this trilogy it is all so well done that, at the last page, you won't quite believe you actually read something that amazing. The first time I read The Hobbit, I felt that way. And I still feel that way about the BJT after the fifth or sixth time reading it through. This book is the consummation of all of more than a thousand pages of perversion and prophecy, strife and sensuality. And what a climax it is. It's satisfying, but I guarantee it'll leave you wanting more.
Rating:
Summary: Loved the whole trilogy!
Review: I thought the character development was well written. Admittedly, There are some stories that could have been continued on. I really enjoyed the entire series!
Rating:
Summary: Ran out of steam
Review: I loved books 1 & 2 the best, because they were so original from other fantasy books I've read. I read all 3 back to back, and by the time I got midway thru book 3, I was tired of the characters. I agree w/ another reviewer that the Janelle seemed adolescent in book 3 when she was already an adult. I just wanted to find out how the whole thing ended because I was 3 books in, not because I was interested in the book itself anymore. I felt like there was this great build-up, especially w/ Janelle's power, but when it came down to it, I wasn't as impressed as I wanted to be. There was a let down w/ the ending. The world Bishop created though, was great and very different. If there are any follow up books, I'll take my time getting to them. These are the first books I've read by Anne Bishop and I'm curious to see what her other books are about.
Rating: 
Summary: Unimpressed
Review: In my humble opinion, this is one of the most overhyped trilogies that I've ever come across. Bishop has a habit of using the same sentence structure over and over again. "Daemon said..., Daemon did...," "Jaenelle said," Jaenelle did," "XYZ character said/did/verb." There are so many other pronouns she could use, and so many other ways she could form sentences; it becomes redundant and a real pain to read. Consquently, there's just something so YA (young adult) about her writing style/technique.
And what's with the S&M fetish? It's a little kinky/interesting the first time around, but by the 3rd book, I'm screaming "Enough, already!" They get the Ring of Obedience off in one book, only to trade it up for another ring -- honor or obedience, take your pick. The male torture of the main characters was just gratuitous.
I saw hardly any character development in any of the characters, particularly Janelle. She's supposed to be a little girl in the first book, and a grown woman by the third book, but her age is sped up so quickly without any sort of lead-up or time for adjustment, that I'm still left thinking about her as a pre-teen. She acts and speaks the same way in Book 3 as she did in Book 1. I found the romantic "love" that forms between Sadi and Jaenlle totally unbelievable as a result.
Also, the ending was so abrupt. Bishop spends so much time conveying how evil and sadistic her villains are, but their demise warrants only a mini-chapter. There were 3 books written to set up Janelle's Dark Court, but the court hardly gets mentioned in the last third of the book.
I found "Queen of the Darkness" to be a highly UNsatisfying read. For a more nuanced, better written fantasy novel with S&M undertones, read "Transformation" by Carol Berg.
Rating:
Summary: Good except for the ending...
Review: With Queen of the Darkness, Anne Bishop closes out one of the best dark fantasy trilogies ever written. The depth and richness of the worlds she created in this series must be experienced to be believed, especially with "good guys" including the likes of Saetan, High Lord of Hell, and his sons Daemon Sadi and Lucivar. Of course, Jaenelle Angelline is the center of attention as always; the young girl we first met in Daughter of the Blood, struggling to find friendship, acceptance, and guidance from those who - unlike her awful family - could recognize her for what she was, has grown up and now sits upon the Dark Throne of Ebon Askavi. She is surrounded by a coven of friends from neighboring realms and their males, protected by the most powerful warlords of the Blood, yet despite her own power as Witch - the almost mythological manifestation of true Blood power, dreams made flesh - sorrow continues to number all of her days. Daemon Sadi, her chosen Consort, has yet to return from the Twisted Kingdom of madness, many Kindred lives have been lost at the hands of the evildoers ruling the kingdom of Terreille, and a cataclysmic war looms on the horizon, a war Jaenelle knows will kill everyone she cares about. I think the beginning of this novel threw me off stride a little bit, and I was never able to completely recover. As Queen of the Darkness opens, several years have passed since Daemon emerged from the Twisted Kingdom, yet he is nowhere to be found. When he is located, largely by luck or fate, and brought to the Hall alongside the likes of Wilhelmina, Jaenelle's sister, he remembers nothing of the cataclysmic events that closed out the first book in the trilogy. When Jaenelle returns, a definite rift exists between her and Daemon, and Jaenelle has little to do with a sister she once loved. The situation with Daemon becomes clear as the book nears its end (culminating in a very touching scene), yet I felt there was a strong disconnect between the characters. Later, when the evil plots of Hekatah the dark priestess and her hateful ally witch Dorothea must finally be dealt with once and for all, I didn't completely buy into the way things happened. Certainly, there were some surprises, and I could barely stand to see some of the things that took place actually happen, but things just didn't seem 100% right. The pivotal subterfuge around which Jaenelle's secret plans are put into motion seemed especially contrived - it was as if everyone just decided one morning that they should look at a central character differently, and I never saw any justification for the types of doubts that arose. Fans of the series will be thrilled to know that justice is finally done, and those who have hurt Jaenelle and the members of her Dark Court over the years get exactly what is due them. Sadly, however, some dear characters are also lost or maimed through acts of villainy and the vindictive lust for power. The Kindred, non-human creatures of the Blood whom we encountered in Heir to the Shadows, are woven into this concluding novel in a beautifully intricate fashion, making for a more complex but at the same time enriching reading experience. At the same time, secondary players in the drama, many of whom I had struggled to truly understand, also emerge in grand fashion as the trilogy approaches its climax. Even if I wasn't 100% satisfied with this third and final novel, I have nothing but the highest of praise for Anne Bishop's literary genius and for The Black Jewels Trilogy as a whole. No fictional kingdom of dark fantasy has ever seemed so vivid and original, nor have characters as complex as the main actors in this story ever been seen before - not by my eyes, anyway. The subject matter makes these books unsuited for young readers, but mature readers who appreciate originality and the word-weaving of literary magic will very likely find themselves deeply immersed in this world and come away echoing my final comment here: Anne Bishop is the Queen of Dark Fantasy.
Rating:
Summary: It's too bad the book had to end.
Review: There's not a lot I can say about this book that I haven't said about the others. This series is just beautiful. Bishop has created an exquisite world with characters to match. I'm glad Daemon came back into the story, I missed him in the second book. I also fell in love with the characters of Surreal and Karla. In the second book, Karla made quite an impression, but she became far more real in Queen of the Darkness. Surreal, I think, is wonderful. Bishop really stepped away from her usual female characters when she wrote Surreal. The way she talks, behaves around the male characters, and the way she fights are unusual and she's utterly endearing for it. I find that I disagree witht he comments that the book ended too abrupty, because to me, it didn't seem so much that Queen of the Darkness was about Jaenelle setting up the Dark Court or the actual cleansing of the Blood; but the journey the characters must take to get there. It seemed more that the preparation Jaenelle made and the things Daemon did to give her time were more important. And the scene where Saetan, Lucivar, and Daemon roll Jaenalle in the webs was just extraordinary. This series, in my mind, is one of the best I've read. The world is original and creative, the characters are vivid and painfully human, and the three books are so engrossing they're impossible to put down. Bishop has a wonderful sense of humour combined with a talent for tugging the heartstrings. I'm sad to be done with the series, but I have that wonderful fuzzy feeling one always gets after reading something truly good.
|
