"They would rather burn the throne to the ground than let you sit on it.”
“Then I’ll sit on its ashes.”

Spoilers follow, as well as trigger warnings for sexual violence. The entirely of this review will be on the subject of slavery and colonialism as well.

So What's It About? (From Goodreads)

Sigourney Rose is the only surviving daughter of a noble lineage on the islands of Hans Lollik. When she was a child, her family was murdered by the islands' colonizers, who have massacred and enslaved generations of her people -- and now, Sigourney is ready to exact her revenge.

When the childless king of the islands declares that he will choose his successor from amongst eligible noble families, Sigourney uses her ability to read and control minds to manipulate her way onto the royal island and into the ranks of the ruling colonizers. But when she arrives, prepared to fight for control of all the islands, Sigourney finds herself the target of a dangerous, unknown magic.

Someone is killing off the ruling families to clear a path to the throne. As the bodies pile up and all eyes regard her with suspicion, Sigourney must find allies among her prey and the murderer among her peers... lest she become the next victim.

What I Thought

Queen of the Conquered is unabashedly hideous. Perhaps it seems redundant to say this about a book entirely about racism, slavery and colonialism. But I think this book's power lies specifically in the fact that time and again it delves unflinchingly and remorselessly into the worst that human beings are capable of, and time and again it comes back with troubling, thought provoking questions about complicity, privilege and the lies we tell ourselves about the harm we do in the world.

On one level, this book is concerned with the psyche of white supremacy - how it relates to greed and material gain, the way that it reifies itself through processes of dehumanization and brutality over centuries. We see the human cost of these oppressive systems in their agonizing reality, and we see the way that colonialism justifies its abuses by insisting that it's actually all for the good of the colonized. Some of the violence in this book is explicit and impossible to ignore, but Callender is just as interested in the subtleties of the racist ideology, showing that even the most enlightened and liberal people of  a privileged group cannot entirely escape that ugly way that that privilege was earned or the insidious way that white supremacy weeds its way into the mind.

On another level, this book is equally interested in the psyche of a very specific class of people: those with some modicum of privilege and societal power who are nevertheless oppressed in other aspects of their identity. This is where Callender explores something that I've rarely seen explored in fiction: the way that a person of a marginalized identity may become complicit in a system of oppression because they are privileged in other ways and stand to profit from the system of oppression because of that aspect of privilege. Sigourney is black, yes, but she is a free woman who controls her own island - and therefore reports to the kongelig and upholds the massive mechanism of slavery that keeps the colony running.

She is an incredibly complicated character - there are moments of clarity where she is full of self-loathing for her complicity in her own people's oppression, but for every one of those there are ever more where she justifies her actions to herself, telling herself that she is using her privilege for a noble cause, telling herself that she could not achieve her goals of overthrowing the kongelig without playing by their rules. But I don't think it's actually justice for her people that she is after, merely selfish vengeance at the cost of the people she currently enslaves. She tells herself that the ends justify the means, but how can this be true if the means are slavery, murder and rape?

The twist at the end of this book is absolutely fantastic, and I'd rather not spoil it for anyone. Rather, all I'll say is that with the story moving in its current direction I couldn't be more excited to see what happens next- oppression may divide the oppressed, and the ultimate revelation of how this may be weaponized was excellent.

My main concerns about Queen of the Conquered involve the pacing issues created by the inclusion of Sigourney's kraft, which is psychic magic. This ends up taking the form of infodumps about people's lives, and while the majority of the psychological profiles were interesting I have to admit that it could be frustrating for the plot to slow to a crawl every few pages while Sigourney explained every character's secrets and thoughts. The reveal at the end was explained solely by Sigourney reading people's minds, which felt like an odd way to convey the most important part of the story.  In addition, I ended up getting a little impatient with the way that Callender repeated the same world-building and exposition points more than once. I sometimes appreciate this if the world is especially complex, but in this case I didn't think it was necessary.

I also read a lot of reviews that complained about Sigourney as a protagonist, which I think boils down to how comfortable you are subjectively with morally-grey and deluded protagonists. She repeatedly makes terrible decisions and engages in despicable practices such as forcing her slaves to sleep with her, and she could be extremely hard to stomach at times. I'm able to sit with a protagonist I despise as long as the hatefulness is in service of an interesting point, which I think it is in this case. But if you don't like reading about shitty people...well, stay away from this one.