Queen Of Swords by Katee Robert

Queen Of Swords
by Katee Robert
Rating: 4 of 5 stars

My Review:
This was quite a space opera/adventure. It had a little bit of everything in it: space travel, paranormal, suspense, harlequin-esque secret baby, intrigue, contemporary drunk partying, daddy-issues, etc. I would be hard pressed to categorize this into only one genre.

Ophelia was quite an intense character. She was constantly faced with tough decisions. She did pretty well with them, at least as well as you'd expect when you're puking through most of the book. She was well tuned in to what was needed of her and even when she didn't want to do it, past guilt kept her walking the road laid out for her. I wasn't really sure how her partying and drunk sex ways lined up with being a gun runner and generally trying to hide from the authorities. She woke up from her first night with Boone, remembering nothing and thinking she really has to stop doing that so she doesn't kill anyone or get kidnapped. I couldn't figure out if that was simply something she did out of guilt (her ship was taken and crew killed) or if that was generally her personality anyway. Most of that got pushed aside when the adventure started anyway.

Boone had a lot of his shoulders too. He was rather domineering and controlling, even if he was trying to do what was best for everyone. He wakes up to his feelings for Ophelia before she sees them and is willing to work through whatever's necessary to be together. Like all the other characters in this book, he walked a fine line between likable and distasteful. He's honorable but also demanding enough to not give explanations. He's a bit annoying when he doesn't truly listen to the people around him, but luckily most of those people are strong enough to take matters into their own hands.

No one in the book was truly good or evil. The good guys did bad things and the bad guys weren't without their complicated motivations. People died and were betrayed and had friends betray them too. I enjoyed the amount of thought behind it all and the action, but there were so many different worlds and cultures, I don't think we got a real intense taste of what any of the cultures' or individual's motivations were. I didn't feel like a whole lot of world building took place. Lots of drama and action but not a lot of the whys behind it.

There were lots of injuries and blood. I mean, LOTS of blood. People bleeding and dying but generally carrying on with life as necessary. Not so much sadism that I had to stop reading, but it was always lurking in the background. It was all very intensely action-packed.

This was more drama/action story to me than simply a romance-type novel. I thought that Boone and Ophelia had an almost Klingon style relationship with each other. There was a lot of fighting, a broken nose, some stabbing and other various injuries in between the times they expressed caring and had sex.

This wasn't a very emotional book for me, but in the end I think that was good. If the bad parts were written more intensely I probably would have stopped reading. Instead the book took a birds-eye view of most of the physicality and emotion to make it an intense story but not a tear jerker or sadistic madhouse. It was a swashbuckling adventure in outer space and a good start to a series.