Anya, a Faerie of Chrior, is the niece of the Queen of the Faerie Kingdom. When the Queen tells her that she is dying and that Anya must take her place as Queen, Anya is overwhelmed to say the least. She has no desire to rule, but instead likes to spend her time traveling to and from the human world. However, if Anya doesn’t rule, then the crown will fall to her cousin Illumina, a Faerie who is extremely prejudiced against humans and who will ruin the relationship the Faeries have with the humans. The only option Anya has is to go out into the human world in search of the Queen’s son Zabriel, who ran away two years ago. Anya believes that if she can convince him to come home then the pressure to rule Chrior will be off of her.

I was really excited to read this book. It has a gorgeous cover and the story just sounded so different and interesting. And while I did like the story, I found it hard to get through. This book was over 500 pages. While I’ve read many books longer than that, this was a LONG 500 pages. There were many times throughout the book where I felt the story dragging, and I think probably 100-150 pages could’ve been cut from this book and it would’ve made the pacing better. I really had to push myself to get through this once I hit the halfway mark, and while I will say it did pick up a lot towards the end, it took awhile to get there.

I oscillated between liking and disliking Anya. At first she seems pretty selfish–she wants to go off and find her cousin so that he can rule instead of her. First of all, her aunt obviously though she was the best for the job so maybe she could have at least given it a chance instead of running off. Second, her cousin obviously ran away for a reason, and does she even stop to realize that maybe bringing him back will just make him miserable all over again? No, she is only thinking about her needs and how she has to give up her freedom when she becomes Queen. Also, she has this boyfriend Daric in the Faerie realm who is just supposed to sit around and wait for her to have her fun out in the human world? That’s kind of unfair. But aside from all of this, I will definitely say that she grew a lot throughout the book and became more selfless and understanding of other people.

I really liked the world building in this book and I think that was the only good thing about the length–it allowed Kluver to really show us a lot of the human world. I still would have liked to see more of Chrior though; the book starts off there but Anya quickly leaves and I would say about 90% of the book is spent in the human world after that. The Faerie world seemed really interesting and I’m hoping in future books we get to see more of it.

This book definitely had a great adventure and wasn’t just a fantasy book. There was a lot about political unrest both in the Faerie and human world, and the book had a lot of twists and turns. The ending was not something I expected at all and definitely left a big cliffhanger.

Overall, The Queen’s Choice was an exciting story that dragged slightly because of the length. However, the ending was a big twist and will definitely leave you excited for the next book.

The Queen’s Choice will be released on January 28, 2014.