Queen Sacrifice Brings Complications

Rachel Newhouse has now released Queen Sacrifice, the next book in her Amazon-bestselling Red Rain series … and like Jonah, it leaves the story feeling palpably closer to some inevitable and irreversible conclusion.

Jonah ended with one of the biggest cliffhanger endings the series has seen yet (which is saying something); Queen Sacrifice picks up moments later, opening with a resolution of that cliffhanger involving what seems to be, quite literally, a miracle. For me, this used up most of the “willing suspension of disbelief” credit Mrs. Newhouse has built up over the course of the series, coming far too close to what Patricia Wrede called the “hack writer’s gambit”—but as it ends up causing Our Heroes even more trouble over the course of the book, it works here.

Queen Sacrifice continues the trend of increasingly explicit Christian themes, as the escalating tension of the series brings the characters through spiritual crises. I’m of several minds about this, however: the church gatherings we see “on screen” are invariably of a charismatic strain, and a fair amount of the arguments spoken using religious premises come from characters whose loyalties are strongly in question (and these arguments are generally of the “seemingly plausible but not entirely sound” variety) … but this series is aimed at the “middle grade and young adult” market, and “seductively dangerous theology” is a particular danger to such readers. (I recently discovered the “for parents and teachers” page on the author’s website, which enumerates “content warnings” in the typical categories in surprisingly detailed fashion; I’m of the mind that parents should consider “dubious theology” as another category similar to “violence” or “sexual content” when deciding what to allow growing minds to consume, but unfortunately identifying instances would be an all-but-impossible task for an author even aside from the divisions that seem to make one denomination’s heresy another’s core teaching, and listing them without giving spoilers would be almost impossible as well.)

As (almost) always, Mrs. Newhouse’s command of narrative voice shines through in Queen Sacrifice, so that once I got going I could scarcely put it down. However, as with Jonah and “Laodicea”, the characters’ “voices” were far too similar; if the chapters weren’t labeled with the name of their point-of-view character, deducing whose “head” the story had us currently “in” would require a fair amount of detective work on the part of the reader—especially early on.

As the series has gone on, the length of each entry in the series has tended to grow. Red Rain was distinctly a novella (the original cover even said “A Novella”), but at nearly twice its length Queen Sacrifice is clearly a full-length novel (if perhaps somewhat short by modern SF standards). The increased length is a definite improvement, and offers the author structural opportunities that would otherwise only be possible between books (and that Mrs. Newhouse had mostly not left herself time to plan for) … but it also means that any defects in the structure can stand out to some eyes. In this case, it felt like several of the events (each taking a scene or two or three to describe, possibly interspersed with other threads) could have been rearranged with little change to the story. As much as I appreciated the extra lead time to read the novel and write this review before the official release, some additional revision might have been helpful.

As mentioned above, Jonah ended on a major cliffhanger, which in my review I said was “perhaps Mrs. Newhouse’s biggest cliffhanger ending yet”; Queen Sacrifice matches or exceeds it. If your opinion of cliffhanger endings is like mine, I would suggest waiting to read this until the next book is at least formally announced.

Finally, about the title: I am not entirely sure what in the story it is primarily intended as a description of, but that’s in part because I can think of several possibilities that would all fit. Since the title is also a more directly evocative one than some previous titles in the series, I certainly can’t think of a better title for this novel.

On the whole, I consider Queen Sacrifice a worthy addition to the series, well worth reading (for adult readers of strong faith, as alluded to above), but it’s not quite up to the standard set by previous entries. Even so, however, I’m looking forward to finding out what happens next.

I received a “free” electronic copy of *Queen Sacrifice as a supporter on the author’s Patreon.*

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