Cruel Crown

Cruel Crown by Victoria Aveyard
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

These two novellas under the titles of Cruel Crown are decent short world building stories. One follows Cal's mother and the other follows the leader of the resistance. I would say that I enjoyed Queen Song more than I enjoyed Steel Scars, but this was mostly due to the way it was presented.

Queen Song is a typical plot and dialogue story. Steel Scars has this, but it also contains communications between Farley and her superiors officers. Unfortunately with Steel Scars there is so little depth that it left me wondering what the heck the point was to the novella in the first place.

Since this seems to be a trend these days, with authors giving us short novellas in order to tide us over until the next novel; one would hope that they would at least be substantive enough to make it worth your while. A great example of this would be Sarah J Maas's Assassin's Blade novellas. Those gave you insight and history into the character you had already fallen in love with.

Queen Song and Steel Scars collectively only give you world building. The characters are not ones we wish to latch on to as the were cursory to the original story. I write this having only read Red Queen and not the rest of the series yet. Perhaps I'll appreciate these more when that occurs. Right now? Even though it took practically no time at all, I feel like I have wasted my time reading these books.

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