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Finished The Queen of Blood by Sarah Beth Durst (whose last name my earlier read Lingo informs me is a now disused past tense of “dare”, although undoubtedly it's derived from other roots), which is 1st in her new Queens of Renthia series and was on the library's feature shelf with a sticker proclaiming it to be “Virginia's Staff Pick”. Virginia seems to have pretty good taste, as this had some of the more interesting worldbuilding I've read in recent years. The plot setup was pretty standard and executed well enough with a few pleasant misdirections of my expectations: the titular “Queen of Blood” ended up being someone other than I thought the narrative was setting it up to be, among other nice surprises.
But the background culture and revealed details of the setting were quite novel and engaging and done in a convincingly cohesive manner (back cover flap blurb says the author has previously won a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award), taking place in an elemental magic world where tree-dwelling mostly non-magical humans (albeit with unusual skin colours, for which leaf-green is an option)—who've built skybridge-connected cities within a megaforest and may have never set foot on the actual forest floor—live in uneasy harmony with destructive nature spirits kept in check by a non-hereditary merit-based queen who is selected from women with the rare ability to control the spirits. There are nice touches like a science-based tech trick being considered “magic” by people who use and are used to actual spirit magic, and a complex DIY transportation system outside the cities, apparently consisting of one part Tarzan swinging and one part ski-lift-style wire-gliding, plus counter-weighted lifting baskets. Although some part of me can't help but wonder about the public sanitation arrangements for the tree cities, though it's probably for the best that there wasn't a Victor Hugo-style Parisian sewer digression chapter.
Recommended if you think you might be interested in a mildly non-standard coming-of-age/world-problem-solving fantasy with slightly YA sensibilities (the author usually writes YA, and this shows some traces of it in the training montages for the girls studying for queen-candidacy and the important life lessons they learn) literally elevated by taking place in a rather unusual setting. I really liked this novel, which turns out to have been a self-contained pre-emptive stealth prequel (author's note in the back said that editor liked the original idea she pitched, but proposed that it become #2 in the series and give the backstory of another character as #1), and look forward to seeing more of the world in future installments, as well as what some of the characters eventually went on to do.
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