Summary
Queen of the Conquered is set in Hans Lollik, an archipelago much like the Caribbean, conquered centuries ago by the pale Fjern, who hold its Black islanders in slavery. Sigourney Rose is an islander, and the only Black landholder on the islands. As a child she survived the massacre of her family by the Jannik family, a noble house of the kongelig, the Fjern ruling class, and she was raised afterward by the Lund family, whose name she takes. She has kraft, a magic that lets her read and bend minds, and she means to take the throne, and her revenge with it.
When the kongelig gather on the royal island, Hans Lollik Helle, to settle who will succeed to the throne, Sigourney goes, pledged to marry Aksel Jannik of the family that killed her own. On the island the nobles begin to die one by one, and nothing is quite what it seems. The regent, when she reaches into his mind, has nothing there: he is an imposter. The enslaved islanders do not trust her, and Løren, a mixed race half brother of the Janniks who acts as her guard, least of all. Løren, it turns out, has been orchestrating events with the enslaved islanders, among them Agatha, a girl whose kraft makes illusions. Sigourney kills Agatha, and she ends the book agreeing to join Løren and the rebellion.
Sigourney tells the story in the first person and the present tense, and she is not easy company: vengeful, hypocritical and blind to what her choices cost the people she claims to be fighting for. That is the point, and it is also the difficulty. Publishers Weekly found the first half sluggish and Sigourney too passive, while praising how convincingly the book shows "the corrupting influence of unchecked power and privilege." It suits readers who want a fantasy of slavery and revenge that refuses easy answers.
Historical Context & Significance
Queen of the Conquered won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2020, at a convention held online. The other finalists were Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth, Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police, Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower and Alix E. Harrow's The Ten Thousand Doors of January. One of that year's judges was Victor LaValle, who had shared the Best Novel award two years earlier. Orbit had published the novel in November 2019. Reviewing it at Tor.com, Alex Brown traced its roots to Danish colonial rule in the Virgin Islands and their slave revolts of 1733 and 1848.
Callender was born in 1989 on St. Thomas, in the United States Virgin Islands, and worked as an editor at Little, Brown. This was Callender's first novel for adults, after books for younger readers including Hurricane Child. A sequel, King of the Rising, followed in 2020, the same year Callender's King and the Dragonflies won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.
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