Review: Cruel Crown

Cruel Crown by Victoria Aveyard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I somehow managed to not realize this was a thing until today. Well, not really. I did see a few hints about Cruel Crown floating around the intarwubs, but I didn't really put two and two together and realize it was a compilation of the two Red Queen e-book novellas (so far), with a few bonus features included for good measure.

The two stories couldn't be any more different just because of their protagonists. One is Silver, one is Red. One's royalty, the other a rebel. One is part of the system, and the other won't rest until the system is brought down. It's a pretty good study in contrasts, and together with the exciting forty-page sneak peek to Glass Sword, this quick little Target book aisle read is a nice little addition to this Franchise of Sharp, Bleeding Crowns.

My favorite parts, however, were the bonus materials. I think most of those were Target exclusives, so I do recommend you try to find the book at Target if you can just for those. But in those exclusive bonus materials, we have an awesome array of fanart from around the world (and I'm happy to see that some of this fanart comes from twentysomethings like myself - as if we needed to prove that new adults still read YA.) And, most important of all, there's a map of Norta. Now, while I was expecting that Norta was somehow based on northern England or Scotland or something (mostly because of Mare's last name being Barrow, which automatically makes me think of John Barrowman), I instead saw that Norta was instead based on the northeastern US. Which, given Victoria Aveyard's New England origins, makes all the sense in the world.

And now I can say I'm sufficiently pumped for Glass Sword. Bring it on. And, of course...

RISE, RED AS THE DAWN.

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