Queen of Always by Sherry D. Ficklin

If you haven’t read the first two books in this series, go read them now.  Really, go read them.  I’ll be here when you get back.

All finished?  Great!  Now, weren’t they absolutely fantastic?!

I mean, that beautiful cover alone is enough to make me want to pick up the whole series and just sit down and binge read them in one weekend.  And now that the trilogy is complete, you can!

I fell in love with this series a while back when I got an ARC of the first book, Queen of Someday.  As soon as I had finished the first one, I got the second book, Queen of Tomorrow, from NetGalley, and I read that one in less than a day.  So I was obviously over-excited for the third and final book in the series, Queen of Always.

I definitely wasn’t disappointed.

Writing a review for this book will be difficult because I don’t want to give away any spoilers for those of you that haven’t read the first two books (didn’t I tell you to go read them?), so this won’t be long and detailed.

Queen of Always picks up one year after Queen of Tomorrow left off.  It doesn’t begin on a light note, and I’m not going to lie, I needed some tissues by the end of the first chapter.  We still have Catherine, who is busy dealing with Peter (who is immature and annoying as ever, of course), his mistress (who is one of those characters you want to reach right through the page and slap), and her own lover, Sergei.  Things are complicated for Catherine, especially while the empress is still alive and making her life a living nightmare.

While dealing with the many issues she faces in her life, some new twists come to light that cause her life to be, well, even a tad bit more complicated (as if the poor girl hasn’t been through enough already), and it’s interesting to see where things go.

This book has the same powerful heroine, Catherine, and the other characters that made the previous books so addicting.  Ms. Ficklin did a marvelous job of wrapping up the story, and didn’t really leave any loose ends or problems (the only real problem was the fact that this series is just a trilogy…why did it have to be over so fast?).

Note: I received an ARC copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.