Crown of Feathers Book Review

Crown of Feathers by Nicki Pau Preto

From Goodreads: I had a sister, once…

In a world ruled by fierce warrior queens, a grand empire was built upon the backs of Phoenix Riders—legendary heroes who soared through the sky on wings of fire—until a war between two sisters ripped it all apart.

I promised her the throne would not come between us.

Sixteen years later, Veronyka is a war orphan who dreams of becoming a Phoenix Rider from the stories of old. After a shocking betrayal from her controlling sister, Veronyka strikes out alone to find the Riders—even if that means disguising herself as a boy to join their ranks.

But it is a fact of life that one must kill or be killed. Rule or be ruled.

Just as Veronyka finally feels like she belongs, her sister turns up and reveals a tangled web of lies between them that will change everything. And meanwhile, the new empire has learned of the Riders’ return and intends to destroy them once and for all.

Sometimes the title of queen is given. Sometimes it must be taken.

---

First up, thanks to Netgalley for giving me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Has anyone else heard the buzz about this book? I think it was last year at YALC, that I first heard about Crown of Feathers, and boy did it sound exciting. It has magic, phoenixes, an intricate world, phoenixes, rebellions, phoenixes, romance, and did I mention…PHOENIXES?

So yeah, you could say that I was pretty thrilled when I got approved for a review copy. Even though I’ve been in a bit of a reading slump recently, I thought this might be the book to pull me out of it.

Except I was wrong.

I should start by saying I didn’t hate the book. I loved the premise, and I thought that when it got going, it was really actually quite good. There’s lots of intrigue and high stakes drama, and there were some plot twists that totally struck me unawares. There were moments when I was frantically turning the page, so keen to find out what happened next. And I will also say that, despite having three main POVs, it never lacked in character. I could always tell whose chapters I was reading, and all the voices seemed really strong and well developed.

In fact, I have only two gripes with this book. And my main one is the amount of exposition. The first few chapters were littered with info-dumps, like huge chunks of them. There was one point where there was a bit bit of exposition every two paragraphs or so, and one bit of backstory lasted two pages. I get it, some of it was a necessary evil, but it just felt so heavy handed. In the first chapters alone, I learned all about the mythology of the world, the history of the rebellion, how phoenixes worked, how animage abilities worked, the history of one of the main characters and a lot of other things that I probably did need to know, at some point, but it felt so crowded so early on that I usually found myself skipping them. I know I shouldn’t have, but good books aren’t meant to have that much info-dumping. If you can’t avoid it, keep it as short and sweet as possible. I figured it would be a short-term problem, and that we would get to the actual story soon, but unfortunately the info-dumps just kept coming. And it was a huge shame, because they turned an amazing story mediocre in my opinion.

The other flaw is kind of a spoiler [albeit a fairly predictable one], so if you’re really keen on reading this sans spoilers, you might want to skip the following paragraph.

I won’t get too much into it, except to say that YA has a bit of a problem with chemistry between two characters when one of them is pretending to be a different gender. Honestly, if this happened in real life, people would be so pissed. I mean, the idea behind it is ‘wow, I find you so attractive that I like you even while you’re pretending to be a boy’ but in reality, it’s just kind of wrong? It would be so confusing and problematic if people did this in real life, but it’s fantasy so we’re meant to be okay with the catfishing that goes on when someone pretends to be someone they’re not like this.

Also, as a minor point the last twist right at the end of the book is utterly predictable. The foreshadowing was not subtle at all, and I knew right from the beginning that the twist would be there and what it meant.

Overall, I would give Crown of Feathers a 6/10 stars. I loved the premise, but in all honesty the exposition killed it for me. I might be tempted to pick up the sequel, just to see where it heads, because the characters were all great, but I was not happy with the info-dumps.