Book Review: Once a Queen

Once a Queen by Sarah Arthur (Waterbrook, 2024).

When I started reading Sarah Arthur’s new novel, Once a Queen, I thought I knew exactly where it was headed. About a quarter of the way in, I realized that, in fact, I had no idea. I kept going, and soon I thought I had it all figured out. A little later, I discovered that I did not.

This book keeps you guessing, is what I’m saying.

Sharp-eyed fans of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia will of course spot the title’s reference to that series. And those who get into the book will discover a storyline that seems as if it could be picking up where Lewis left off. When 14-year-old Eva Joyce visits her grandmother in England for the first time, she finds her to be a complex, guarded woman who loves fashion but hates all talk of fantasy worlds—even though her home and grounds are practically crammed with otherworldly artifacts. You don’t have to go far to find Narnian parallels here—you practically trip over them at every turn.

But Arthur hasn’t written a novel to help solve the “Susan problem”—the perpetually vexing question of what happened to Susan Pevensie, left alone outside Narnia, after the series ended. That is, not exactly. What she’s written comes across as more of a “what if.” What if someone like Susan, barred from the other world where she once reigned, lived a long life in our world and had a granddaughter who came poking around, looking into a past that the grandmother would rather forget?

In Arthur’s telling, what happens makes for a lovely, compelling story, both of a young girl finding a heritage much richer than she ever knew, and an older woman too ravaged by pain and fear to reclaim that heritage for herself. Every discovery Eva makes seems to raise more barriers between herself and those she cares about—her grandmother, her mother, and her new friend Frankie, whose relatives work on the estate. But she’s driven to keep searching for more, believing that finding her grandmother’s lost world is the way to break through those walls.

Arthur gives us lovingly drawn, complex characters who are easy to care for despite all their flaws, frustrations, and misunderstandings. There are passages reminiscent of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, in which Eva finds that what she thought were her greatest weaknesses may in fact be strengths. There’s even a character partly based (according to an Author’s Note) on Dorothy L. Sayers, which of course instantly endeared her to me.

And there are bittersweet coming-of-age moments that help keep the story grounded. Through all her fairytale adventures, disappointments, and delights, Eva learns that you can’t force someone to change, but you can still hold out hope that they might find peace at last.

If Once a Queen isn’t actually the Narnia continuation I expected, its very unpredictability turns out to be part of its charm. And as it’s the first in a series, I’m already eager to find out what happens next!

Once a Queen releases on January 30; you can pre-order it at the links below.

(Cover image copyright WaterBrook. Thanks to NetGalley for the advance review copy.)

Book Links:

Once a Queen on Amazon
Once a Queen on Bookshop

(Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualified purchases.)

Goodreads Links:

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