Wooing the Witch Queen (Queens of Villainy, #1) by Stephanie Burgis Narrator: Amanda Leigh Cobb
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, fantasy romance, gaslamp, romantasy
Series: Queens of Villainy #1
Pages: 304
Length: 8 hours and 34 minutes
Published by Bramble Romance, Macmillan Audio on February 18, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
In a Gaslamp-lit world where hags and ogres lurk in thick pine forests, three magical queens form an uneasy alliance to protect their lands from invasion…and love turns their world upside down.
Queen Saskia is the wicked sorceress everyone fears. After successfully wrestling the throne from her evil uncle, she only wants one thing: to keep her people safe from the empire next door. For that, she needs to spend more time in her laboratory experimenting with her spells. She definitely doesn’t have time to bring order to her chaotic library of magic.
When a mysterious dark wizard arrives at her castle, Saskia hires him as her new librarian on the spot. “Fabian” is sweet and a little nerdy, and his requests seem a little strange – what in the name of Divine Elva is a fountain pen? – but he’s getting the job done. And if he writes her flirtatious poetry and his innocent touch makes her skin singe, well…
Little does Saskia know that the "wizard" she’s falling for is actually an Imperial archduke in disguise, with no magical training whatsoever. On the run, with perilous secrets on his trail and a fast growing yearning for the wicked sorceress, he's in danger from her enemies and her newfound allies, too. When his identity is finally revealed, will their love save or doom each other?
My Review:
They say that eavesdroppers never hear anything good about themselves, and that’s certainly true when Archduke Felix of Estarion arrives, in the dead of night, at the castle belonging to Saskia, the Witch Queen of Kitvaria. He’s hoping for a sanctuary that he desperately needs. She’s in conference with her allies, Queen Lorelei of Balravia and Queen Ailana of Nornne, the other two so-called Queens of Villainy, and they’re all making some pretty villainous comments – about him.
The thing is, the queens may know each other – however reluctantly at least on Saskia’s part – but they don’t really have a clue about Felix. They think they do, because his chief minister, former guardian, ex-father-in-law and torturer of long standing has been committing plenty of greedy, grasping, outright rapacious moves in his name, but Felix has had no voice and no say. He’s been a prisoner in his own castle, under constant guard and equally constant torment as well as honest-to-badness torture, ever since his “dear guardian” got himself proclaimed Felix’ Regent and took control of, well, everything.
Felix managed to escape, and planned to throw himself on Saskia’s mercy, only to discover – there’s that eavesdropping again – that there is no mercy to be found. He has no one to turn to and nowhere else to run. However, while his uncle may not have allowed him to be educated in anything useful, he has let him study useless things like literature, letting Felix lose himself in libraries for hours on end. Felix isn’t stupid – and he’s very desperate.
Which is why he decides to take advantage of Saskia’s distraction and hide himself in plain sight – not as either the Witch Queen’s prisoner or her hostage – but as her dark wizard librarian. In spite of being, well, technically, neither of those things. But dark wizards are allowed to hide their faces behind a mask – or deep in their dark cloaks. Librarians can hide in their libraries. Saskia needs a magical cataloger and is happy to hire the mysterious stranger who has just wandered into her castle, seemingly as the answer to ALL her prayers.
As it turns out he actually is – even the prayers that she never even thought to utter – or believed she was worthy of even thinking about voicing.
Escape Rating B+: Definitions of villainy are clearly in the eye of the beholder, making the title of both the book and especially the series a delightful bit of irony. Because there’s nothing wrong with witchcraft, unless calling it that is an attempt to make the magic that women practice lesser than that of men. Which is exactly what labelling Saskia the “Witch Queen” of Kitvaria is intended to do.
But the Queens of Villainy of the series, including Saskia the Witch Queen of Kitvaria, are only villainous in the eyes of all the men who are frightened by their power and offended by their ability and are desperate to find a way to knock those queens down so they can step all over them.
Something that’s not going to happen as long as they stick together and OWN their power. Once they ALL figure that out, the story is utterly glorious. But it takes a bit to get there.
Because at the beginning, the “Witch Queen of Kitvaria” is not exactly the “Queen of All She Surveys”. She’s not even the “Princess of Quite a Lot”. As the story opens, Queen Saskia acts more like Mistress Doormat in spite of her ascension to the throne.
Which is the point where I need to reveal that I began this book in audio. I thought it would be fun. And it eventually is. Howsomever, the wonderful thing about audiobooks, particularly when the story is told in the first person singular and the reader gets to sit inside the protagonist’s head, is that when the story is told well, when the narrator is a good match for the character, and, most importantly, when it’s a head that the reader enjoys being in, the experience is fantastic. This particular audio hit two out of three. The story is told well, and the narrator, Amanda Leigh Cobb, was an excellent narrator for Saskia – but Saskia’s head, particularly for the first third of the story, was a place that I didn’t want to be. I wanted to see how things worked out, I adored the premise of the story, but Saskia let everyone push her around to the point where being in her head did not work for me AT ALL. I needed her to just put on her big witch panties and DEAL WITH IT. And that took a while.
So I switched to text at the quarter, Saskia found at least one leg of those big witch panties at the one third point, and from then it was off to the races and the story got totally glorious.
This was even one of those rare cases where the misunderstandammit at the heart of the romance actually worked. Felix couldn’t reveal himself to Saskia until they trusted each other – even though he was all too aware that telling the truth would break that trust. By the time he felt compelled to unmask, he was in a position where she might, deservedly so, break his heart, but was considerably less likely to take his life.
After all, one of Saskia’s magically adorable scene-stealing crows had made Felix “HIS” librarian whether he was actually a librarian or not.
As much as Saskia drove me, well, batty at the beginning (complete with actual, magical, bats) I still felt for her. Not only is she in a really difficult position doing a damn hard job she never really wanted, she also does a terrific job of portraying the dilemma of an introvert stuck in an extrovert’s job – and being caught between the things she wants to do that she’s always been good at, and the things that have to be done that she hates and is terrible at. While everyone around her tells her over and over that she has to become someone she’s absolutely NOT in order to succeed.
The slow-burn romance between Saskia and Felix is utterly lovely, especially because it’s marvelous to see the way they work towards a relationship that is built to be unequal – because she outranks him – and because the story does NOT flip things to make him the leader of their partnership just because that’s the way it’s usually done. Nothing about Saskia or her relationship with Felix is “the way things are usually done” and that’s one of the points of the whole thing.
As is the still developing sisterhood between those three Queens of Villainy. A sisterhood that is already strong enough that they still have each other’s backs – even when one of them massively screws up ALL their plans.
In the end, this worked for me, even if it began in some places I really didn’t want to go. Once Saskia started taking charge of her own life and destiny, in spite of the forces arrayed against her and the voices inside her head telling her that she was doing ALL the wrong things, the Queens of Villainy reminded me a lot of two other stories of women having or seizing power and the little men around them throwing really big, bloody temper tantrums as a result. So if you like the idea of the Queens of Villainy you might also enjoy Fear the Flames by Olivia Rose Darling and The Women’s War by Jenna Glass.
And they might help tide you over while you’re waiting – as this reader will be – for the second book in the Queens of Villainy series, Enchanting the Fae Queen, coming in January 2026.
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