 Hello my darling extraterrestrials, I am Kim, this is Dustmoats and Velikor, and The Queens of Innisfilir by Tessa Gratton is the new, lush, intricate, beautifully crafted high fantasy novel for those with an immense amount of patience. Gala, Reagan, and Elia are the three daughters of the King of Innisfilir, an island that 900 years ago was forcibly, magically separated from its mother continent, and in the meantime has been allowed to grow rather wild. In this wilderness, magic is practiced many ways, through wormwork, which is a complex understanding of the earth and her rituals, through the language of the roots and the trees and the wind, learning to listen and learning how to speak back, and through reading the prophecy written in the stars. The King, a third son and a star priest himself when he was thrust into the role, became quite fanatical upon the death of his wife, the Queen, and the mother of the three princesses. He eschewed all forms of magic and worship aside from the stars, believing them to be all, and commanded his kingdom to do the same. Gala, the eldest, set herself on a path to become the warrior king of Innisfilir, and she raged against her father's fanaticism, claiming she needed no higher power except herself. Reagan, the middle child, clung to her big sister through all things, becoming almost her second self. She advanced in witch work and diplomacy, listening to all things, even those left unsaid. And Elia, the youngest, followed her father in his grief, forgetting the lessons in the language of the trees taught to her by her oldest friend Ban, the bastard son of one of her father's earls, and devoting herself entirely to the stars. Until, her father starts to lose his grip on reality, and that is when this wild island begins to riot. This book has a lot of things going on, and also a lot of things left to be desired. I'm gonna start with the good things, because I do want you to read this book. It's Tessa Gratton's first adult high fantasy novel, and she's adding some much needed nuance to the genre. For example, the three princesses of Innisfilir are black. Their father is described as being pale with watery blue eyes, whereas their mother is described as a slip of night, black skinned with glass beads glinting in her roped black hair, like ice or tears or stars. She was the granddaughter of the Empress of the Third Kingdom, and the people in that kingdom are black. So if you're looking for a good example of a story written by a non-black author that includes blackness but isn't about blackness, check out Queens of Innisfilir. It's also told from way too many points of view, some for only a single chapter, and it's non-linear to the point of redundancy, though I believe that was intentional. Like I said, nuance. Tessa Gratton also has an odd way of giving the characters and, in turn, the readers new information. Occasionally, she'll use foreshadowing, and then one character will bring a secret to another character, and then that character will bring the secret to slightly more characters that are very important to the plotline, and they'll all have a big reaction. And then it becomes apparent that someone else knew, too, and then it all culminates in a flashback of the scene from the imperative perspective, so the person it was actually happening to. This happens with some flexibility to the format, three or four different times throughout the book. I feel like switching the order of these revelations could add to the building of tension, and honestly, it could be truncated a little bit. There were several unnecessary repetitions in there. I do not think it's a detractor that she lets her characters tell their own stories, but it definitely adds to the page count. Speaking of, this book is 574 pages long, and there are definitely moments that grab you, but there is a lot of beautiful, intricate worldbuilding that grows like a creeper vine in between those moments of plot. And that takes time and focus, which I struggled with. This book is not a page turner. There are very few cliffhangers that leave you salivating for more. It moves with a chimerical, meandering grace that I found a little too easy to walk away from. But that meandering gait is part of the style, the aesthetic of this book. And this book's got quite a lot of that. Dialogue has that lilting Shakespearean tone, more poetry than prose. Even the chapter headers are filigreed. If this book were a movie, aesthetically, it would be the lovechild between the secret garden and the mists of Avalon. Rapid topic shift? In this entire book, I noticed one typo. The typesetting red flaunting instead of flouting, which was an obvious mistake given the context. She says having misspelled flouting in the script for this review. But seriously, this book is really impressive. It tackles sisterhood in a way that I have never seen in media before. It looks at marriage with a keen eye from within and a keener eye from without. There's poetry and polytheism, and it discusses teaching religion to your children, which is a huge concept. Grief plays a part in growing older, and so does growing old. Coming of age is a separate issue from growing up, and that was very delicately handled. Formerly unsympathetic characters become human within their own perspectives. At its heart, this book is the paradigm shift within each character's life, and those characters happen to be the axis on which a nation tilts. So the stakes are pretty high. I will be the first to admit I do not understand this book. I will read it again in a year and again and again at five-year intervals to see what new meaning I can drink from its root water. I don't think I'll ever be satisfied with the ending, but I think that's kind of the point. Tessa Gratton, I doff my imaginary hat to thee, for you have created a work unlike any I have met before. This book is for anyone looking to expand your world view. It will help with that. What is your favorite high fantasy experience? Do you prefer world building or plot? That's kind of a peanut butter and jelly question, because you need both in order to have a book. Do you like heavy on the world building or heavy on the jelly, which is plot? This is kind of an apt metaphor, actually, because world building is that savory, crunchy stuff that you need in order to have a book, and the jelly is that sweet tang that you chase that's the plot and that keeps you moving forward. This has been a tangent. Abiento.