Download The Witch Queen djvu

Good conclusion to the series but predictable

I found the trilogy at my local library two years ago. I read all three then I purchased them for my Kindle. I especially enjoy how the author began with a 16 year old girl and reared her into a brave and wise woman.

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.

Witch's Honour

Jan Siegel (pseudonym for Amanda Hemingway) is also the author of "Prospero's Children" (1999), which was chosen by the San Francisco Chronicle and Library Journal as One of the Best Books of the Year, and "The Dragon Charmer" (2000), the two books that precede "The Witch Queen (also titled "Witch's Honour "- 2002) in this fantasy trilogy starring magically-gifted, Fern Capel.

These three books need to be read in order if any sense is to be made of Fern's increasingly complicated love life and her growing power as a sorceress. The first novel in the trilogy, "Prospero's Children" started out as a YA coming-of-age fantasy, choc-a-block with evil villains (a witch, an idol, and an art gallery owner) and eccentric good guys (the Watcher, a female werewolf, a house goblin). Unfortunately, the second half degenerated into a standard Swords and Sorcery fantasy about Atlantis. It's almost as if the publisher said, "Okay, Jan, this is a great novel but we need another 100 pages, and why don't you throw in a Lost Continent. Lost Continents are very big this year."

Nevertheless, read the Atlantis bit very carefully, because the following two novels constantly refer back to Fern's sojourn in this ancient, drowned world. If this author has a serious fault, it's her overuse of extended flashbacks. Her greatest strength is her darkly imaginative blend of worlds (excluding Atlantis): the World Tree (where Fern spends most of "The Dragon Charmer"), borrowed from Norse mythology and inhabited by nightmarish crones; a sinister London on the cusp of the new Millennium, reminiscent of Neil Gaiman's darker fantasies; and a goblin-haunted house on the moors.

"The Witch Queen" pits Fern (also known as the witch, Morcadis) against the ghastly crone, Morgus (World Tree sojourner from novel two), but this time most of their battle takes place in London. Another old enemy, Asmordis has transmogrified into the President and CEO of the Dark Tower, located (sort of) in the City's center. For the most part, he inhabits Fern's vivid nightmares, but shows up in person to provide a surprise ending to this trilogy.

Many readers will feel let-down by the ending, but I am assuming it will eventually lead to another book in this series that might have started out as a YA fantasy, but grew into something darker, filled with horror and ancient bile.