The Foxglove King (The Nightshade Crown, #1)

by Hannah Whitten

[pamela]

The Foxglove King is a tough one to rate, because on one hand, I had a lot of fun reading it, but on the other, there were some pretty glaring things that did actually detract from my overall enjoyment.

Let's start with the good. Hannah F. Whitten writes beautifully. She does a great job of setting a scene, has built an intriguing magical world, clearly has an idea of what she wants to do with it, and has developed a really interesting magic system that was thematically consistent, that made sense as part of the plot. The prose felt decadent; like having an entire, rich, creamy chocolate cake all to yourself.

But like the cake, The Foxglove King somehow ended up just feeling like too much. It was all flavour and very little substance. The deep world building was only represented on a surface level by the narrative, because instead, we had to follow along the path of a trope-filled romance. Death magic, missing gods, religious cults, dead villages, zombies! I wanted to know more and really dive deeply into the world that Whitten created. Instead, I got pages of angsty YA-trope-filled romance.

Don't get me wrong. I love an angsty YA-trope-filled narrative, but this particular novel just had too many of them. Enemies to lovers? Check. Love triangle? Check. Fated mates? Check. Broken engagements? Check. Coitus interruptus? Check. Betrayal? Check. No one in The Foxglove King had any agency. Partially the point, so I'll give Hannah F. Whitten that one, but even the romances lacked agency. Instead of having feelings develop naturally, it fell back on the toxic destiny trope.

The real issue for me is that The Foxglove King focused too heavily on vibes and not enough on narrative development. There is a world here, and it wasn't utilised. Instead, everything was just descriptions of decadence, with no sense of the wider setting. Protagonists were given skills that they either never used, or when they did use them, they were bad at it. I get that it's the first book in a trilogy and is setting up for development in later books, but they way you get me to read the rest of them is to get me invested, and The Foxglove King just didn't do that. Everything was surface-level, lacking a depth that I sorely needed.

My expectations may have been different had this been marketed as YA fantasy, not adult fantasy. This falls firmly in the YA tropes bracket, so I definitely went in with different expectations than what The Foxglove King could deliver on. Overall, I just wanted more. And The Foxglove King did not provide.