Several months on from finishing Two Twisted Crowns, I write up my review. I feel, though it was a complete mistake on my part for losing track of what reviews I’d written up and what I hadn’t, that it’s a good thing I’ve sat on this one for a while. With many people reacting to Two Twisted Crowns during the preorder hype and immediate release of the book, the post-release opinions weren’t feeling quite the same love from what I could see. So here lies my review of Two Twisted Crowns by Rachel Gillig.

I am a fan of One Dark Window and I’m a fan of Two Twisted Crowns. The dark atmospheric writing carried through into the second book, bringing forth that tension and juicy conflict from the first book. I will say that the writing style seemed to lighten up a little, meaning while it was darker content and environmentally darker (is environmentally a word? If not, it is now.) the character interactions, themes and direction of the plot seemed to lessen in intensity from a description perspective. That ominous, foreboding feeling ebbed and left a more generic setting that many dark fantasies follow at one point or another. Not that it’s a bad thing or that it turned the book into a generic piece of work, on the contrary, I think it was in the interest of Two Twisted Crowns to make that shift. I love a multi-layered story with some greyer aspects of life and morality but I understand that to get a general following for the book, some times choices need to be made that will appeal to the masses rather than the specific kind of reader within a niche. Two Twisted Crowns takes a route best described as “where the characters will end up once everything is over” and works towards the betterment of the community and making the lives of those sticking around that of a happy fairytale ending.

The stakes were handled well in Two Twisted Crowns, as was the detail. I really appreciate the fact that Rachel Gillig isn’t afraid of making things a little horror-adjacent in her dark fantasy. Not only does it make her dark fantasy world a little more gruesome and a little more violent, but it makes it more interesting. If more characters are prepared to be ruthless, to get bloody and do whatever it takes to save themselves or others, then the twists are less predictable and the tension and pacing can rise and increase while still engaging the reader in what will become an intense conclusion. There may have been a lull at the beginning to middle with the new perspectives and focuses (that is one aspect of the book I’m indifferent to) but otherwise it felt like an appropriate second book and conclusion to a compelling story world.

My criticisms aren’t so much objective mistakes with the book as they are personal takes on detail and characters. While I understand that this book needed a new building romance between two characters to replace the romantic tension brought up in One Dark Window between Elspeth and Ravyn, it felt a little predictable with the two in question. I will omit the names in case you haven’t read it yet, but the enemies-to-lovers pipeline was evident with this one. The only problem is that they weren’t really enemies to start with and it felt a little as if the trope was wedged in there for the sake of tropifying the book. The tropification of books is something I’m still working to understand, but for a brief explanation, the tropification of a book is when the text is reduced down to the tropes and cliches found in the novel as a means of categorising and marketing the book to readers. It’s seemingly a popular way of recommending books on social media, namely Tiktok and Instagram, as listing the book’s tropes is concise way to recommend a book in a short timeframe. I don’t dislike the characters but I don’t like the tags put on their relationship simply because I didn’t like it was correct. You are mor than welcome to correct me because, as stated in the beginnign fo this review, it has been months since I read Two Twisted Crowns and my memory of the book is spotty.

I do recommend Two Twisted Crowns and The Shepherd King Duology to those interested in YA and NA dark fantasy, as well as dark fairytale readers and readers who enjoy a little more horror and gore in their fantasy books. If you’re a fan of Erin A Craig, author of House of Salt and Sorrows, House of Roots and Ruin, and Small Favors, or Emily Lloyd-Jones, author of The Bone Houses and The Drowned Woods, I think you’d really like this duology.