My copy of Scorpica was gifted to me by the publishers, Titan Books, in exchange for an honest review.
A centuries-long peace is shattered in a matriarchal society when a decade passes without a single girl being born in this sweeping epic fantasy that’s perfect for fans of Robin Hobb and Circe.
Five hundred years of peace between queendoms shatters when girls inexplicably stop being born. As the Drought of Girls stretches across a generation, it sets off a cascade of political and personal consequences across all five queendoms of the known world, throwing long-standing alliances into disarray as each queendom begins to turn on each other—and new threats to each nation rise from within.
Uniting the stories of women from across the queendoms, this propulsive, gripping epic fantasy follows a warrior queen who must rise from childbirth bed to fight for her life and her throne, a healer in hiding desperate to protect the secret of her daughter’s explosive power, a queen whose desperation to retain control leads her to risk using the darkest magic, a near-immortal sorcerer demigod powerful enough to remake the world for her own ends—and the generation of lastborn girls, the ones born just before the Drought, who must bear the hopes and traditions of their nations if the queendoms are to survive.
I enjoyed Scorpica a lot. I loved the matriarchal society that G R Macallister created and the way each queendom had a different area of specialism – Scorpica is a queendom of warriors, where baby boys are sold to the other queendoms shortly after birth and the baby girls grow up to fight and protect the world, whereas Arca is a queendom of magicians, Bastian is full of scribes, Paxim full of traders and Sestia full of farmers. We spend most of our time between Scorpica and Arca, but we see bits of the other queendoms and have a variety of point of view characters. I also liked the breadth of time covered – we start in 501 and finish in 516, and get to see how this matriarchal society copes when there are suddenly no girls being born and no-one knows why. The world-building was great, and I’m still thinking about some of the things that happened in this book.
But my god, it is dense. Now I would normally read a book like this in about a week, especially one I was enjoying. Scorpica took me an entire month. A month! It destroyed my reading target for both January and February, and I have no idea why it took me so long to finish it. It wasn’t the writing style, because I enjoyed that. The point of view characters and their companions were great, especially the group that Jehenit, Eminel and Vish were part of, so it wasn’t the characterisation. It could have been because I got attached to a character who didn’t survive for very long, which both surprised and jolted me a bit, or maybe just because the proof was printed in tiny text. Whatever the reason, it was a much longer read than I had anticipated, so it’s a good job I did enjoy it!
I can’t say that the plot whips along, because it doesn’t, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Instead, we get a book that is focused on exploring the political and societal worlds of the Five Queendoms in a way that makes each character’s actions make sense. If there’s a weak point, I think it’s probably the primary antagonist, whose main motivation appears to be power and for me, personally, it wasn’t really compelling enough, although I enjoyed the latter part of her plotline. There’s also a character I didn’t particularly get on with, but I think that’s mostly because they were responsible for that death I mentioned above (I hold grudges over fictional character’s deaths. I still haven’t forgiven Melanie Rawn for a character she killed off in a book more than 25 years ago!). My favourite character was probably Vish, who can never quite forgive herself for abandoning her homeland and her queen, even though she also knows she had no choice.
I’m very interested in seeing what happens next. Obviously I’m not going to say what happens at the end, but the events of the last few chapters do change the direction of the story quite dramatically and I very much want to see where Macallister is planning to take it. I’m also hoping to see more of the other queendoms we only passed through in this book – Bastian in particular is somewhere I’d like to explore further.
If you’re a fan of epic fantasy, Scorpica could easily be your next favourite book. I’m glad Titan offered me the chance to read it, as I’m not sure I would have picked it up in a shop, but I’ll definitely be looking out for the next book!
4/5
The Five Queendoms: Scorpica is out today from Titan Books.
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