Six Wild Crowns

Six Wild Crowns is a historical fantasy reimagining of the life of Henry the Eighth and his 6 wives, but with polyamory/polygamy. Which is a great premise. I also really enjoyed a lot of the other world-building in this book, like naming their main deity Cernunnos (a pre-Christian Celtic god) and giving first-born daughters the family name as their first name, so that even after marriage everyone knows what family she came from. However, a lot of the world-building was also way more wishy-washy and should have been explained better (e.g. what actually are Henry’s powers?). The story took a bit to get going, so for me it took until about the 50% mark to really get hooked on the mystery and intrigue that was happening. There obviously is plot before then, but it was more focused on establishing the world and the 2 POV-characters and their relationships. As for the plot, it was rather predictable and nothing new; the magic system based on oppressive patriarchy and misogyny is bad and a lie, who could’ve guessed! But honestly I don’t think that diminished my enjoyment of the story by much, cause I still really liked it. Now, I didn’t grow up in the English-speaking world, so my knowledge of the historical events this is based on stems mainly from the musical SIX and is thus quite limited. I know the wives’ names, the mnemonic («divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived») and the whole creation of the Anglican church thing. The author explicitly states at the beginning that she’s taken some liberties with the historical facts, but I was still pretty sure that one of the POV-characters would end up dead by the end. And yet the ending still hit like a ton of bricks. In part also because I am a hopeless lesbian who was illogically holding out hope for Seymour and Boleyn to get together. Also this is tagged as «Dragons» on goodreads, but do not read this for the dragons. They hardly appear at all and play no role in the plot. Since the dragons weren’t the main selling point of this book for me (it was actually the lesbians), I wasn’t too disappointed by their insignificance. Though I do really hope that we’ll get to see more of them in the sequel. All in all, I am really excited to read the sequel, whenever it comes out. I hope it contains more dragons and lesbians though.