Title: A Trial of Vengeance
Author: Abigail Grant
Date: 2021
Publisher: Abigail Grant
Quote: "He probably went to one of the other five kingdoms and got himself killed."
The Princess of Fae is called Ensley, or Ens or Ensy, and for a twenty-year-old chick she's remarkably cool about the possible death of her brother and, a few pages later, the on-stage death of her father and mother. She's infatuated with, but barely knows, the palace person to whom she gives her virginity shortly after her parents' death. I don't like her much.
Maybe it's the incongruities. When Ensley's first act as Queen of Fae is to challenge King Alix of Lupos, she asks her assembled people to show whether they want to fight (remain standing) or want to accept exile from Fae ("take a knee"). She has to be the only Faery Queen who's ever affected contemporary pop-culture cliches. The royal families of the faery, werewolf, vampire, and other magical kingdoms also have names that come straight out of the telephone directory, like Duran and Keene. The faeries, in particular, should have no difficulty whatsoever passing for humans. There's nothing faerylike about them.
Anyway, this is the at-least-it's-short story of how Ensley and her people came to be living in hiding among humans, which offers possibilities for interesting plot twists. This is a prolific writer. Either she's housebound by a disability and does nothing but write hasty, not very well planned fiction, or she uses ChatGPT and cleans up the plagiarized texts it spits up. I find myself not caring which.
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