Title: The Vanished Queen Author: Lisbeth Campbell
Published: August 18, 2020
Genre(s): Fantasy
Page Count: 496
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Long ago, Queen Mirantha vanished. King Karolje claimed it was an assassination by a neighboring king, but everyone knew it was a lie. He had Disappeared her himself.
But after finding the missing queen’s diary, Anza—impassioned by her father’s unjust execution and inspired by Mirantha’s words—joins the resistance group to overthrow the king. When an encounter with Prince Esvar thrusts her into a dangerous game of court politics, one misstep could lead to a fate worse than death.
Esvar is the second son to an evil king. Trapped under his thumb and desperate for a way out, a chance meeting with Anza gives him the opportunity to join the resistance. Together, they might have the leverage to move against the king—but if they fail, their deaths could mean a total loss of freedom for generations to follow.
One of the worst things in life is when media has a great premise but utterly fails to execute. Lisbeth Campbell’s The Vanished Queen is a standalone adult political fantasy novel that is (theoretically) about a woman overthrowing a tyrannical king. This is a good concept! Unfortunately, a great idea does not a good book make. This novel is plagued with various problems, from shallow characterization, unrealized world-building, a dull, plodding pace, to a story resolution that felt underwhelming and smelled like white feminism. Mostly, I credit this book’s failure to stick the landing to a lack of depth.
Firstly, although two of the book’s three narrators are female, I never got the sense that this was a story about women. In the present-day, Anza is a middle-class woman with the privilege of an expensive education and weapons training (in this world, owning a weapon of any sort is illegal). After her father is killed, Anza joins an amorphous “resistance” that has very few goals or creeds aside from “the king is evil.” In the past, Mirantha is a queen married to a much older king who rapes and abuses her regularly. These split timelines eventually converge into a single narrative.
While I like what Campbell had in mind with her protagonists, the characters of Anza and Mirantha lack agency. For well over half the plot, neither of them do anything—rather, outside forces act upon them, directing their fates hither and yon. Mirantha’s husband controls her, her sons are taken from her, she begins an affair with a priest more or less against her will. Anza is, at various times, in the wrong place at the wrong time and is caught by the king’s soldiers, or she kills someone but it wasn’t really her choice, etc. Very little of The Vanished Queen shows any of its women making real choices for themselves, be they large or small. Towards the end, when the actual palace coup against the king is staged, this changes—but that’s only a handful of chapters out of a 500-page novel.
But the lack of agency isn’t merely a problem with Campbell’s female characters; the third narrator is Esvar, Mirantha’s younger son and Anza’s eventual lover. Esvar also seems to be buffeted by the winds of fate, and a great deal of what happens to him in the story is directed by either his despotic father or his older brother, the crown prince. Esvar supports his brother’s claim to the throne, but he’s certainly no kingmaker.
The lack of people doing things in this book is compounded especially by the lack of things happening. This is a “political fantasy” with a teeny, weeny scope. Although Campbell hints at a larger sociopolitical picture in the kingdom and in the world as a whole, she doesn’t really delve into it. (More on this later). Rather, The Vanished Queen is solely a book about staging a successful palace coup, as seen through the eyes of three people at the top of the heap. Most of the scenes in this book are people talking about overthrowing the king, or people thinking about overthrowing the king. 500 pages of talking is a lot to ask of readers. I think it might have worked had Campbell given her story a sense of urgency, but there doesn’t seem to be any rush to get rid of the king by any of the characters. On one hand, I can understand the need for caution and deliberation when overthrowing a tyrant; on the other hand, 300+ pages of caution and deliberation hardly makes for riveting fiction.
Particularly odd is the way Campbell…never really shows us what’s so bad about the king to begin with. Every single character repeats over and over that he’s “evil,” to the point where the word ceases to have meaning. However, we don’t see any actual evil deeds being committed, except perhaps as a quick anecdote told by one character to another. Throughout most of the book, the king is either off-page or is shown as a miserable-yet-dying monarch who, while unpleasant, is hardly healthy enough to do anything truly nefarious. Firstly, I think it’s a grave mistake to simply portray your villain as “evil” with no sense of nuance or shades of gray; it’s boring and juvenile. But if you must do so, at least back up your claims that’s he’s evil with some real evidence. Esvar can swear his father’s a bad guy until he’s blue in the face, but as a reader, it’s difficult to get invested in overthrowing him if I don’t have a true sense of the stakes.
Also, the fact that the “resistance” was just a band of random rebels who tried to blow things up occasionally without a solid, unifying purpose was a major flaw. It’s hard to root for such a messy organization! And honestly, it was unbelievable how all of a sudden at the end, the resistance was able to successfully oust the king. There was no transition time between several chapters of infighting and and brilliant victory.
The most disappointing thing about The Vanished Queen (and the book’s largest shortcoming) is the complete lack of world-building, culture, or larger-scale political vision. The author invests almost no time into setting the scene, and the end result is that the setting is vague and nondescript. From the character names, one assumes that the country is majority white and possibly inspired by Russian / Eastern European culture. But, as I said, most of the book involves only a small group of characters who travel between two or three main locations, so it all feels very closed off.
More concerning, however, is the way Campbell seemed to start to introduce the concept of racialized politics and BIPOC, but abandoned this through-line very quickly on. A neighboring kingdom is populated with people of an ethnicity that’s coded as being POC. The protagonists’ country and this neighboring kingdom have been at war previously, and it seems that another war is looming. What makes things particularly tricky is the fact that a large population of this POC ethnicity actually lives within the protagonists’ country, and it’s very clear that the current king (and society as a whole) have marginalized and scapegoated them mercilessly for several decades.
However…The Vanished Queen doesn’t do anything with this. We have a punch of oppressed brown people…then nothing. Not a single person in the “resistance” is a POC, nor does anyone seem to consider their goals or desires at any point. The text makes it very clear that the group with the most skin in the “overthrow the king” game are the members of this ethnic minority…but not a single one of the white characters reaches out. Rather, Azra and Mirantha sit around and say “oh, poor things,” then proceed with their “badass” coup attempt. Supposedly, simply swapping out the evil white king for his less-evil white son is supposed to fix race relations in the kingdom?
Yet it we know anything, we all know that systemic racism doesn’t just happen overnight because some asshole assumes power. Lisbeth Campbell wants me to think that the evil king alone was responsible for the oppression of POC, and that removing him washes away the problem. That’s hopelessly naïve and, dare I say it, white feministy. The Vanished Queen suggests that just because the privileged white female protagonist is no longer oppressed, either (a) all other oppression cease to exist or (b) all other oppression ceases to matter. That’s gross.
So, I guess if you want a book about rich royals sitting around and talking about how bad the king is and then removing him, this might be the book for you. For myself, I’m far less interested in “girl power” narratives about white women that fail to consider the way race and wealth also come to bear upon the oppression of women. And notwithstanding the novel’s utter failure to meaningfully engage with systemic marginalization, I don’t think The Vanished Queen is well-written to begin with.
As I said at the top of the review, this is a book with several very good ideas, but absolutely zero follow-through.
