Book Review: Queen B by Juno Dawson

Returning to the world of HMRC for a Tudor throwback with a witchy, lesbian twist

Anne Boleyn, historically accused of witchcraft—what if she really was a witch? I mean, you're not getting points for the originality of the premise, but I can't say I'm not interested. The eponymous Queen B exists in the background of the existing two HMRC novels as the progenitor of what grows into a national, official coven, and this novella purports to give us the beginnings of it all.

And it does well... kinda?

We are not following Anne for this story. Instead, we begin with the perspective of one of her ladies-in-waiting, her closest companions, her coven, watching as the swordsman takes her head. The narrative then jumps backwards and forwards in time between the year of her death and the time, a few years earlier, when she prepared to ascend the throne, and her brief time on it, all from the perspective of Grace Fairfax, transplanted Yorkshire girl, lesbian and witch. Because we couldn't stray too far from the métier of the original two novels, after all. Grace has the proximity to give us an intimate view into Anne's life and goals, trying to get a witch onto the throne of England to make life better for all her sisters in the process, as well as an emotionally invested view into the aftermath of her death—what this means both for the witches of England and for those who were closest to Anne herself. This ultimately leads to some events that in some ways prefigure the world we come to know in Dawson's novels.

But don't go in expecting a story about the creation of an official bureau of magic. This isn't that. This is, instead, a much messier, more personal story about love and people, and wanting and betrayal. It's about the risks people take, the lies they tell themselves, and the things that matter enough to them that they will make terrible choices to get them. Also, lesbian witches. Plenty of that.

As it happens, that's exactly the sort of story I like, so I was very happy reading this. Grace is a great narrative viewpoint character, occupying a half-in/half-out position with the royal household, thus giving us a way to evaluate the events of the story with a slightly more objective eye while still being invested in them. And by god is she invested. We get a good bit of rage, as well as some more complex emotional moments from her, and if nothing else, the woman doesn't go by halves, which is great fun to read.

But despite not being the protagonist or a viewpoint, it's the characterisation of Anne herself, occupying the edges of the narrative, that is the most striking. Obviously Anne Boleyn is a much covered fiction staple—her position in English history, her relationship with Henry and his break from the Catholic church, her ultimate end, all serve to make her a fascinating, shifting character onto whom a number of takes can be projected to suit the narrative need. Temptress, victim, political machinatrix, religious reformer, pawn—all available angles to take, all options explored in fiction already. But Dawson chooses simply to make her... messy. Which I'm absolutely sure has been done before as well, but it's the first time I'm reading it and I rather like it.

Dawson's Boleyn is compelling, charismatic and political, yes, but she's also someone whose motivations and ambitions are a little opaque, even to her. Possibly (probably?) she is lying to herself. The options are left open to interpretation by the reader, but what we are definitively given is a person, someone who exists as more than one thing to more than one of the people around her, and does not do it flawlessly. Someone whose perfection is only in the eye of the ones who love her more than they see her, for a time. We also see her exclusively through the people around her, and her own legacy-making—half of the story exists once she has already gone away, and some of it through what she has left behind, the words spoken to friends and lovers, letters hidden, gifts bequeathed. For a story not told from Anne's perspective, it does an awful lot of interesting centring of her, her interests, her propagandising and her failings.

Particularly interesting is that it does all of that, all of that focus on Anne, her wants and her machinations, while at the same time almost entirely sidelining Henry as both a character and a narrative force. He exists off to one side, reported on, creating change, but rarely spoken of directly or the focus of discussion. And even for the stories that centre Anne elsewhere, this is incredibly rare—as with all of the wives of Henry VIII, her entire narrative is conveyed to us now through the lens of her relationship with the king.

I have mixed feelings about this, as a choice? On the one hand, I deeply appreciate the narrative detaching the story of a really quite famous and interesting woman from the male framing and focus she receives in almost all tellings. More stories of people who get to exist outside of their status as wives, mothers, siblings and daughters of the powerful men of history, please. But at the same time, the story is deeply interested in a lot of things that were going on because of Henry. Anne's death is extremely central, as is the impending coronation and installation of Jane Seymour as her successor. For the women who are telling this story, Henry is an important motive force in their lives. He is the architect of the seismic changes in the world they live in, and will be again. To ignore his presence in the story renders its telling a little strange. We see the ripples in the pond, but never the stone that made them, and I wonder if the story would be less effective if it did not rest on the assumption of knowledge on the part of the reader—is this story less well told for someone not familiar with this bit of British history?

Then again, for all that those dramatic ripples shape the story, they are not the substance of it, and perhaps it truly does not matter—maybe the knowledge of things works against me, distracting me from what is on the page and back to the conventional narrative? Who knows.

In any case, this is a story that lives in the empty spaces, the rooms of women in a court of men, the relationships between women in a world whose documentary evidence largely ignores them, and aside from any concerns about narrative framing, that is wonderful. The moments that focus on the relationship —romantic, in case that wasn't already abundantly obvious from the blurb— between Grace and Anne are few, but nonetheless moving. Dawson has a knack of capturing moments, little frames of view that work as vignettes, as if we're seeing fond or closely guarded memories, sectioned off from the world around them. In those moments, we can clearly see the foundations of Anne and Grace's affections, as well as the faultlines, and they give us a great deal more insight into both characters as much through implication as by actually showing.

What is likewise wonderful is how clearly Dawson acknowledges the limits of the perspective she's chosen. Grace, our narrator, is a noblewoman and member of the court, in the inner circle of the queen, but also someone whose beginning was... if not humble, then rather more middle class than many of her now-peers. She has enough of an eye for social disparity that, when faced with people of much poorer origins and lives through the course of the story, she gives us someone whose sympathy and understanding seems plausible. She's not one of them, but she's those few steps closer, able to exist in the space between, and mediate. And this has allowed Dawson, though briefly, to do some very necessary acknowledgment that, while the problems the witches the story follows are serious and significant, impacting them all deeply and emotionally, at the same time they are living charmed, gilded existences, and their oppression as women and witches exists on a spectrum that continues well past them. This is a story about a Tudor royal court with commoners in it fully willing to speak up for themselves, to name the hypocrisy of the wealthy, noble women and look it straight in the eye.

But it is a novella, so the space for such things is brief. Good, well managed, pleasingly blunt, but brief.

Likewise, Dawson does not go into great depth, but there are glimmers of a very well handled approach to religious belief and witch-hunting in a story that could very easily have leaned into an easy good guy/bad guy approach. We see witch-hunting and the religious fervour underlying it used both cynically and entirely in earnest, by different groups of people with different aims, and understand that for every person using it as an excuse to squash such female power as could survive in the world of 16th-century England, there is another who truly believes that his actions follow the will and mandate of god himself.

Warlocks, too, get an interesting complexity. We have met them in the series' novels previously—typically less powerful than their female counterparts, sometimes resentful of this difference, but fundamentally under the same umbrella of magical ability, if separate in hierarchy. Here we see them before that union, men existing in an explicitly and intensely patriarchal system, using their social superiority in opposition to the witches' magical one. And then again this is unbalanced by class hierarchy—a noble woman witch and a common man warlock exist in extremely interesting dynamics of shifting power in different contexts, and it's a space Dawson is very happy to play in. This is possibly my major criticism of the story; I wanted to see more of this. The narrative is at its best when it plays with the messy social and power systems it has created, but we simply do not spend the time with them to truly explore what they mean to the people living under them. It makes sense: the novella is a novella because the linear story, the set of actions it follows are fairly simple and brief. Extending it would risk wallowing and soggy pacing. But there is so much in what Dawson has created that is fascinating and unusual that I nonetheless wish there had been more story to tell, just to give us the time to spend here.

But it's not, alas, the book we are given. What we do get —an emotionally engaging, historically interesting little snippet into the history of the world of the HMRC books— is still extremely enjoyable. It's a book that's easy to consume in a single sitting, a narrator it's easy to sympathise with, understand and root for, even as she makes decisions the reader may not agree with, and a little insight into how the world of HMRC came to be. If we imagine them as an alternative history, this is in many ways simply a story of the branching-off point, the slight difference that leads to the dramatically different present.

And that's neat. Is it a great deal more than neat? Of that I'm less sure. But if you go in with your expectations set, knowing it's a window into a short period of time, an implication of what's to come after, rather than a thorough explanation, it is very easy to have a great time with it and see some interesting storytelling choices while doing so.

The Math

Highlights: Genuinely interesting choices in depicting Anne Boleyn; brief glimmers of some cool intersectionality; fun backstory and worldbuilding to the existing books

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Reference: Dawson, Juno. Queen B [HarperVia, 2024].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Review: The Shadow Cabinet by Juno Dawson

The sequel to HMRC unfortunately lacks the punch of its predecessor, but promises good things for what follows next.

It was always going to be difficult, coming after Her Majesty's Royal Coven. Not just because it was a pretty solid book (although it was), but because of how it ended things - it left us in a position with no Niamh as a viewpoint character, and, at least for me, she was one of the most useful viewpoints we had. Maybe not the best, maybe not the most sympathetic, but the most useful - she was a voice of insight into what the eponymous HMRC itself was doing, while being outside enough to be involved in all the action, the bridge between the worlds of the story. Leonie may be the more sympathetic, more morally laudable one, setting up a coven for minority witches who feel the government backed stuff is full of problems, or maybe Theo, about whom all the trouble of the first story revolves, and who feels often to be the true heroine of events. But Niamh is involved in everything, talks to everyone, has a reason to be involved on all sides and so is the great facilitator of the story, all while being still plenty sympathetic enough, with her heart in the right place and sufficiently strong morals that you're on her side, even if she's not all the way up the scale. In purely story logistical terms, she's critical.

So, when you cut out one of the most important voices of your first book, how does the sequel work? You have to replace her. And Dawson does do that... but none of the replacements are really satisfactory.

Most prominently, Ciara, Niamh's evil twin, is inserted into the story and she's really just... not as good. She's less sympathetic (though not completely without her pull - she's hardly had an easy life, as we soon discover), less involved, less knowledgeable (being in a coma for a decade will do that), and just less pulled together. She's someone the story feels like it happens to, for the most part, rather than someone who really has much deliberate effect on the turn of events. I'd say the majority of the chapters are told from her perspective, and by the end it definitely began to feel claustrophobic for it, just because she's so walled off, so hidden from so much of what's going on with everyone else, it's hard to feel like what she sees and does is totally connected to the rest of them.

Is this deliberate? I think so. It fits in very well with the progression of her emotional narrative for us to feel that way. But is it fun? Not really. It works, but even as it achieves what I'm sure Dawson set out for it to achieve, it undercuts a lot of what made the first book good - it was a fast-paced, easy, character driven romp.

It also has the problem that Ciara is spending much of the story hiding herself, pretending to be her twin. And so the audience has information that most of the characters in the story lack, and that can be hard to manage without it getting awfully grating, awfully quickly. Obviously Ciara knows, so we're not alone with the information, but after a while, the frustration of other characters acting in ways that don't help, due to information they don't have and we do... builds. It's inevitable.

And it's magnified by the other problem - the lack of Niamh is partially solved by spreading the viewpoints out to a wider pool. We have more characters, sometimes one offs, whose perspective we get on the story, which of course means more people who don't know what's really going on. The widening of the POV net also necessitates a shallowing of each character's depth, however, even with the additional bulk of pages The Shadow Cabinet has compared to HMRC. I don't object to some of the characters from the first book who fulfilled more of a side role in the story getting pulled in to give their POV now, and in some cases welcome it - Luke, a non-magical character, is an extremely useful view of things to have - but it's not quite done enough to leave the reader feeling satisfied. They're not quite main characters, even still.

That being said, one of the main strengths of the book is Theo's perspective in her own chapters. Theo, teenaged, scared, constantly alert to things that may throw her personal situation back into disarray, is one of the few parts of the story where the lack of knowledge of Ciara's role works. Because Theo suspects. She's smart, strongly magical, and has the opportunity to really see differences, and so the suspicion she has forms a great piece of character work on her dynamic with Niamh, and how she relates to the world, and how that in turn relates back to her history. She's also a very compelling view of a teenager - simultaneously entirely plausible, with very teenaged concerns and slips of judgment, but still very accessible to an adult reader. Her chapters and her role in the events of the story were by far the most enjoyable part for me, and I hope we get even more from her going forward.

Outside of characters, much of what was strong about the first book does remain - the world building has all the hallmarks of good urban fantasy, and blends very well with the real world, picking and choosing which bits to retain and which to change. Much like the first, Dawson is interested in being true to the societal and political realities of Britain to tell her story, whether that's transphobia, racism, class dynamics or Anglo-Irish tensions, but in this it heads more into the directly political, in sometimes interesting ways. We see and interact with the mundane Prime Minister in this, and Dawson has chosen not to make him a direct pastiche of any particular figure, but rather have him take characteristics of several recent Tory PMs (there's definitely some David Cameron in there, but also some Boris Johnson too)... I have to wonder if this is because the story was written when we were so busy chucking one and getting another that she could have no certainty who'd be in charge by the time the book hit publication.

But she also engages a little deeper than that - there's a government aide with strong Dominic Cummings vibes (which gets interesting quickly), and a witch who opens us up to a view that, in witch society, with its strong notes of female... if not supremacy then at least casual disdain for men... even there, we have some people open to accepting "tradwife" style ideologies. With a witchy aesthetic overlay, of course. When this blends with the wider story themes around patriarchy and power dynamics, and the need for some people to see themselves as inherently superior, it lends her whole witch society another layer of realistic complexity that was part of what made the first book work so well for me.

Because this is not, fundamentally, one of those "what if women were the powerful ones" simple stories, like The Power or a hundred others. Juno Dawson acknowledges that even though her siloed witch community may be powerful and may have their own, separate ideologies and prejudices and histories, they are not immune to the power structures endemic in the world around them, and nor are they so inherently "better" that they can choose to rise above them simply by being smart enough, kind enough or in tune with nature enough. They are people living in a complex, intersecting world, full of intersecting identities, problems and relationships, and all parts of that touch all others, for better and for worse.

This, truly, is the strength of the story. Taking the elements of a fairly standard urban fantasy idea and infusing them with something richer at their foundation, to make the whole that much sturdier, deeper and more interesting. In the first book, this was accompanied by the pacey storytelling, the interesting characters and a general surprise and delight to find it doing what it was doing, when it may not have been expected.

However, in book two, the delight has worn off a little. We come in expecting what we had before, and so our bar is that bit higher. And, alas, it has very much succumbed to second in a trilogy syndrome - a lot of the plot feels like filler, like a way of joining us from the first to the inevitable last, and scene-setting for something greater moving in the background. There's an ongoing thread of the plot around the tripartite satanic background enemy, but it remains in that background as other pieces move around it, giving it the necessary time to build up for the climax. Character elements too are clearly being manoeuvred into place, and so the payoff at the end of the story feels... subdued. We're still clearly waiting for the real ending.

But... but. Especially in the final section of the book, some of those bits of scene-setting are genuinely tantalising. Enough to make book two all better? No, not really. But enough to make me think book three may manage to be just as special as book one? Well... I'm certainly hopeful.

--

The Math

Highlights: returning to an interesting world with genuine richness and complexity, getting more depth on some interesting minor characters from book one, Theo is great

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Reference: Juno Dawson, The Shadow Cabinet, [Harper Voyager, 2023]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Microreview [Novel] - Her Majesty's Royal Coven by Juno Dawson

 A take on the idea of magic users in a secret bureaucracy, but with an extra tasty layer of interrogation of power structures.

“What if there are magical people, and they’re also in power in some way?” is not an uncommon question for urban fantasy to attempt to answer – Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series does it with the Met(ropolitan Police), Charlie Stross’ Laundry Files with the intelligence/civil service, to name just a couple of British examples. Magic people secretly in the government is an easy and appealing mirror to throw up against existing structures and ask “what if?”. However, many of them tend to take those power structures at face value, as neutral, if not good actors in the world they exist in, and as a vector for interesting storylines, rather than a theme in and of themselves.

In Her Majesty’s Royal Coven, however, Juno Dawson feels the need to take it a step further.

You have all the good elements of a traditional urban fantasy – there are witches in/alongside the British government, they’ve been there for hundreds of years, and they live secretly among the rest of us, doing their witchy business but with rules and laws like, and unlike, their mundane counterparts. We have viewpoint characters within and without HMRC (yep) itself, and so we see multiple sides of an unfolding drama that could threaten the very foundations of the witching woooorrrllld! <end movie trailer voice>. And that’s all great – stories in that mould are often fun, compelling, pacy reads with a wonderful balance of the familiar and strange. You get to see a place you may know (or at least know of) but with a magical twist, and imagine what it would be like if there was that little extra spice in the world. 

But HMRC strives to be more than simply a romp through magical Greater Manchester. In its twin narratives of the present day and memories of a secret magical war that most of our adult actors fought in, it shows us a reflection of real world concerns of supremacy and authoritarianism, and the legacy that lives on even after such a conflict seems to have been won. But in its multiple voices, in its queer and black characters who are reckoning with that legacy not just as the other characters are, but filtered through their own trauma of existing in a white-centred, straight-centred, cis-centred world, it throws away the mirror and brings the real world in wholesale. Analogy isn’t enough, it says. It isn’t just about the bad guys, the magical fascists, who we can let our minds glide over as a historical problem solved, or a fantasy one. Instead, it’s about the here and now, and the problems caused by people who were once on the right side of history but refuse to listen when the time comes for them to accept change.

It is a book enormously about straight, cis, white women and the privilege they hold, when we take away their own gendered oppression, at least somewhat. It is, in fact, one of the rare books that does an inversion of gendered power without kicking itself ignobly in the face – Dawson’s witches are matriarchal, yes, there’s gendered inequality in a world where warlocks (male witches) are seen as inherently weaker and less important, in a world where the women speak in universals that forget or exclude the men. But it’s not the whole focus of the book, merely a part of the picture, and, critically, it is a world that remembers that trans and non-binary people exist, and explores where they fit into those power structures (or are prevented from fitting). Many books whose sole purpose is asking “what if women were more powerful than men?” manage to fail spectacularly, either ignoring trans and nb folks altogether, or bringing them half-heartedly into a story in such a way as to reveal unpleasant biases held. Dawson, unsurprisingly, does neither of these, and highlights queer experiences in this inversion, while presenting us with the good, the bad and all the complicated that inversion might bring.

That being said, there are some issues. The narrative is a little slow to find itself – once I got about a third of the way through and figured out what sort of book it was trying to be, I loved it, and couldn’t put it down, but up until that point there was a bit of a waiting for the other shoe to drop. Not a mystery, but just uncertainty about exactly what sort of story we’re getting ourselves into. However, the remaining two thirds more than make up for it, and once things get going and we realise quite what the antagonistic force is going to be, it entirely lives up to the romp one might expect it to be from the blurb, with a few small hitches and bumps here and there towards the end. This, unfortunately, makes it a very difficult book to review - a lot of the core of what makes it good is somewhat hidden behind some rather plot critical spoilers in the early to mid parts of the book, whose slow revelation is a lot of what goes into making the later parts of the story quite so satisfying.

There’s also something of an issue of character voice – a good number of the characters, even though they have quite different ages and backgrounds – speak in what felt to me like exactly the same voice. That it felt quite similar to my own – mid-thirties, British, female and spending far too much time on the internet – softened the blow somewhat, but the disjoint was occasionally noticeable when, for instance, a very well to do, proper man in his at least forties speaks exactly the same way. It feels very authentic for the core cast of adult characters, and the cultural touchpoints they all lean towards ring incredibly true, with the Spice Girls a strong recurring motif. But by the end of the book, the lack of strong variation in voices starts to feel a little strange, especially in a book that is striving so hard towards (and otherwise mostly achieving) a representatively diverse set of viewpoints.

Relatedly, and mostly in its favour, it is also a book very heavily situated in the now. And in its core themes, this is a great thing, because it is addressing problems that feel like they critically need to be addressed in this sort of urban fantasy, and often aren’t. But on the flip side, it also leans very heavily on the less critical trappings – it’s a book that feels like it will shift to “visibly dated” in not too long, although possibly managing the shift again to “nostalgic” or “classic” later down the line. Because it is heavily rooted in the perspectives of a group of thirty-somethings, and their lives and concerns, and the way they speak to each and relate other in the cultural and linguistic artefacts of the now, and because it takes such pains to realise them in their context of the modern north of England (and it is a very English book), it’s always going to be at the mercy of that context.

But to read it right now, in that context? It’s fantastic.

It is very much a pleasure to read a book that does all the fun, rompy, pacy storytelling I want, but actually gives us a world of authentic problems as well. People can fight the big bad monster and racism at the same time, and the two work together in symphony here, never in conflict. The range of characters and concerns feels far more authentic, far more real, than a book of quietly cis, straight, white characters (if we even know that about them at all) because it feels so much more connected to the world as we live in it. And that’s the core appeal of urban fantasy, at least for me – give me magic, give me drama and adventure, but also give me the pancake shop opposite my old workplace, and memes and slang and the internet and veg box delivery men. Give me people who are like the people I know. Let the real, modern and entirely mundane world be just as magical as the distant, invented one. And it works so much better when the real world we’re shown is… actually real. Is it perfect? No, not at all. But it fills a niche that really needed filling, and does so with joy as well as critique, striking that really tasty balance between thoughtful and escapist.

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The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10 

Bonuses: +1 urban fantasy England but not based in London

+1 being a person who has done some good in the past does not excuse being a really really bad person in the present

+1 it’s so pink

Penalties: -1 parts of what fed into the ending were a little abrupt

-1 it’s so pink

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference:  Juno Dawson, Her Majesty’s Royal Coven [HarperCollins, 2022]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea