The Drowned Queen DNF Review: Beautiful and Lost

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A woman walks into the sea after a century of servitude in a hellscape meant for eternal suffering. She is ready to die. The sea has other plans.

She comes back with cosmic powers—the ability to manipulate shadow and light in ways no one has wielded in centuries. She doesn’t even have a name yet in that first chapter. She’s just presence. Power. Something becoming. And I sat with that chapter closed afterward, repeating one word over and over like a mantra, every other word escaping me, my chest still trying to catch up to what my eyes had just read.

Wow.

Quietly, hopefully, I turned the page into chapter two, carrying that word like a promise: if the first chapter is this rich, this lush, this alive—all I can hope is that the rest of the story expands and evolves that wow into something magical and solid.

By chapter two, she has a name: Lyra. She is thrown into a dazzling Fae court, tasked with reclaiming her memories and her lost love while navigating political dangers, a looming wicked goddess who wants her for her own, and a quest for a second chance that will either redeem her or shatter the fragile balance between worlds entirely.

By 60%, I still wasn’t sure the book knew who she was.

I DNF’d at 60%.

the drowned queen fae fantasy romance book

Title: The Drowned Queen

Author: Elspeth Gregorsdóttir

Publisher: Astral Queen Press

Format: eARC

Genre: Fae, Romantasy, Fantasy, Romance

Release Date: May 1, 2026

Pages: 414

Star Rating: DNF at 60%

Spice Rating: 1 chili pepper (minimal at DNF point)

The Drowned Queen: When Beautiful Prose Stops Being Enough

There are books that are beautiful the way a painting is beautiful—you can stand in front of them and feel something, you can recognize the craft, you can see every deliberate choice. And then there are books that are beautiful the way a person is beautiful. Where the beauty is in service of something alive underneath it, something that makes the beauty matter.

The Drowned Queen reads like the first kind trying to become the second. And for one chapter—genuinely, completely, for one transcendent chapter—it gets there.

The Pacing Problem: A Story Still Looking for Its Rhythm

The Drowned Queen DNF experience is inseparable from its pacing, specifically its unevenness. This isn’t a slow book in the way some literary fantasies are slow, where the deceleration is intentional, and the weight of each sentence is load-bearing. This is a book that surges and stalls without apparent reason, that builds momentum and then sets it down and walks away from it.

What the unevenness does to the prose is cruel. When the pacing moves, the lush detail feels electric. You’re being carried through a word that earns every adjective. When the pacing stalls, the same density becomes suffocating. The beauty has nowhere to go. It just accumulates on top of you.

The deeper issue underneath the pacing is that the detail is working at one note throughout. Every sentence is beautiful. That is not a complaint. That is an observation about what happens when beauty becomes so consistent as to become sameness. When everything is lush, nothing is lush. There were no moments where the prose reached into my chest and grabbed something. No lines I needed to read twice because they hit too hard to absorb in one pass. The beauty was total and therefore somehow invisible. Like living in a house with extraordinary wallpaper in every room until you stop seeing the wallpaper at all.

A book earns its density when the details do double duty. When it is building atmosphere AND revealing character, advancing stakes, paying off something that came before. When the detail does only one job, no matter how beautifully it does that job, the story beneath it starts to feel thin.

A Story That Keeps Abandoning Itself

This is the critical argument of this review, and the reason I’m writing it as a DNF at 60% rather than a frustrated reader who stopped early.

The Drowned Queen has an enormous amount of story architecture on paper. The Duskhold. The transformation. A Fae court. The political dangers. A wicked goddess. The memory recovery. A lost love. The balance between worlds. Any one of these could anchor a novel. Together, in a book that knew how to build them into each other, they could be extraordinary.

But The Drowned Queen doesn’t have a through line. It has a series of through lines. Each one is introduced with genuine promise, each one is set aside before it pays off, replaced by the next thing without resolution or earned transition. The political danger doesn’t build into the memory recovery. The memory recovery doesn’t build into the reunion. The reunion doesn’t build into what comes after. The wicked goddess looms without landing.

Each piece exists.

None of them are load-bearing.

The reunion with Torian is where this failure is most painful. The entire first half builds toward that moment. Lyra finding him, the impossible task of making him believe she is who she says she is after everything that has passed between them and a century of loss. When he finally calls her by her true name, when belief crosses his face, that should be the beginning of the story’s second movement. The hard part comes after: who are they to each other now? What does she owe him? What does she owe for what she’s become?

Instead, the book moves away from him. Without earning it. Without giving the reunion the weight it spent half its pages building toward.

I don’t understand the point of it. And that sentence—I don’t understand the point of it—is the most important thing I can say in this review. Because I’m not confused about a plot point. I’m confused about what story is being told and why. At 60%, with all of that architecture in place, the book was still deciding.

fae romantasy book the drowned queen the diary of a reader

A Character Who Won’t Show UP to Her Own Story

Lyra should be one of the most compelling protagonists in recent fantasy romance. A woman reborn from servitude and death with power that hasn’t existed in centuries. A woman who begins the book without even a name and has to reconstruct herself piece by piece through recovered memory. A woman whose lost love has finally found her again and is reaching for her with everything he has.

And she keeps walking away from it.

The dynamic between Lyra and Torian shifts somewhere around the midpoint. He believes her; he’s trying; he’s calling her by her true name, and she becomes the obstacle. Which could be deeply human. Grief doesn’t follow logic. Holding onto the last ordinary thing you loved before you became extraordinary is a real emotional truth, and her insistence on finding her mortal father despite Torian’s certainty that a century has passed could have been the most vulnerable and devastating thread in the book.

But it’s not written that way. It’s written as resistance without access to what’s beneath it. We’re in Lyra’s first-person perspective, and I couldn’t tell you what she’s actually afraid of, what she actually wants, what the transformation has done to her sense of self. She began the book as a blank slate the narrative was supposed to fill in. At 60%, she was still waiting to be inhabited.

The prose described her. It doesn’t live inside her.

The POV Question: Who Is Watching Torian?

This is an observation worth mentioning specifically because it matters structurally to the love story.

Lyra’s chapters are written in first person. Torian’s chapters are written in third.

That asymmetry is a choice, and choices have consequences. First person places us inside Lyra’s consciousness. We hear her thoughts, we feel her reactions, we are as close to her as the prose allows. Third person observes Torian from outside. We watch him, we see what he does, but we are kept at a narrative distance from what he feels.

For a book whose entire emotional engine is a reunion between two people separated by an impossible distance, that distance matters enormously. The love story needs both of them fully. The reader needs to be inside both of them. To feel what a century of loss has done to him, to feel the impossibility of being believed from her side. The POV asymmetry keeps Torian at arm’s length precisely when the story needs him closest.

It also raises a quiet question the book never answers: who is watching Torian closely enough to narrate his sections? In a first-person narrative world, a third-person POV implies an observer. That observer is never identified (at least not to the point of my DNF). It’s a small crack, but in a book about memory and identity and the construction of self, it’s a crack worth noting.

What The Drowned Queen Does Beautifully

Precision matters in a constructive review, so let me be precise: this book has real gifts.

The first chapter is genuinely extraordinary. The transformation sequence- the sea, the emergence, the becoming- is the kind of opening that earns every wow it provokes. The world has texture. The magic has atmosphere. The premise is ambitious in exactly the right ways. If the rest of the book had grown from that chapter the way a root system grows from a seed, this would be a different review entirely.

And Torian. Torian is doing everything right. He’s patient and reaching and broken in exactly the ways the story needs him to be, and the scenes where he and Lyra are genuinely connecting are the ones where the book becomes what it’s trying to be. He deserved more of the story than he got. He deserved a co-protagonist who was as present as he was.

The prose, at the sentence level, is consistently accomplished. Gregorsdóttir writes with a confidence and beauty that most writers spend years developing. That first chapter proves it beyond question.

The tragedy of this DNF is that all the ingredients are here. The gifts are real. The architecture exists. The through line just never ran through it.