Her Majesty’s Royal Coven

TOP TEN TUESDAY: Favourite Books of 2022

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Artsy Reader Girl. It’s the first Tuesday of 2023 so that’s the perfect time to take a look back at what we read in 2022 and share our favourites of the year. These are in no particular order but they are all books that I gave 5 stars this year and really enjoyed for different reasons. If I wrote one, I’ll link to my review of these books.

Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan
I love Mad Max: Fury Road so a book about how that amazing film was made was always going to be on my radar. I really loved this book and read it in two sittings. It’s so interesting and in-depth about filmmaking and how the production of Fury Road was unlike the productions many of the people interviewed had ever been a part of. If you’re interested in filmmaking at all, I’d recommend this book because it’s just fascinating and a really engaging read.

Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch
I love the world in the Gentlemen Bastards series and Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen are the bestest best friends I’ve read in forever. The audiobooks in this series are excellent too

A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan
The audiobook for this was great and it was fun having an historical and scientific twist on something as fantastical as dragons. I would like to carry on with the series but as I’m putting together my 2023 reading goals, I have a fair few series on the go so not sure when I’d actually get to it.

Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas
I’m always slightly hesitant about reading a prequel to a book I loved a lot but I shouldn’t have doubted Angie Thomas. Concrete Rose is a great backstory to Starr’s father and the world he grew up in and then moved away from in order to do the best for his children.

An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie
I finished my Read the World Project this year and this was my favourite book I read for that project this year. How determined Kpomassie was to travel from Togo to Greenland, crossing Europe and taking just about every form of transportation, is to be admired, and then how he writes about the culture clashes and the things he learnt from his time in Greenland was so interesting.

Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li
Portrait of a Thief is full of the heist tropes I love (and has many Fast and Furious references), great characters, and is all about culture, art and belonging. I really liked how it talked about how museums in the West get the art that’s in them and who the art really belongs to.

Slade House by David Mitchell
I’m a wuss but I do like a spooky ghost story and how this one is a series of short stories across the decades about one house was really creepy and clever.

Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson
Her Majesty’s Royal Coven was so good! A grown-up magical story which includes intersectional feminism and complicated friendship dynamics. Loved every character point of view and there were some twists and turns I did not expect.

Himself by Jess Kidd
Himself was one of the first books I read in 2022 and it’s stuck with me all year. It’s a small-town ghost story/mystery that’s very atmospheric and magical but it also manages to have a pretty wry sense of humour too.

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
Listening to the audiobook narrated by author Reni Eddo-Lodge made Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race all the more impactful. It put into words some of the things I’d been thinking or heard bits about before and just made the puzzle pieces fit together in my brain.

Have you read any of these books? What were your favourite books you read in 2022?

REVIEW: Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson

This book has trigger warnings for transphobia, homophobia, and racism, war and death of a loved one.

Narrated by Nicola Coughlan.

There’s a prophecy that the Sullied Child will bring about a demon so strong that it will cause the end of all witches, and even the end of the world. Decades on from a civil war, Helena, High Priestess of Her Majesty’s Royal Coven (HMRC), will do whatever she can to stop that from happening while her childhood friends and fellow witches have all left behind the bureaucracy of HMRC. Elle is focusing on being a wife and mother, Niamh is a country vet, and Leonie has defected to start her own more inclusive and intersectional coven. But when the child is found and the prophecy is looking closer than ever, the four friends must try and figure out the best course of action as loyalties are tested and conflicting ideals arise.

Her Majesty’s Royal Coven is told via the fours friend’s perspectives and it’s great to get inside each of their heads. Niamh and Helena probably have more focus and development than Elle and Leonie but it’s still an interesting look at female friendship and how some friendships can last decades while others get strained over time. Leonie is a Black, lesbian witch while the other three are all white and pretty middle class so the things she sees and how she reacts to things is often different to the others. She’s incredibly aware of the differences between them and how society treats Black women and gay women differently to whit, straight women but some of her childhood friends just see them all as women and therefore have the same problems.

There’s a lot of discussions in Her Majesty’s Royal Coven about what it is to be a woman and how transwomen fit into that. A lot of the anti-trans rhetoric that we hear nowadays is used though it’s always clear that it’s wrong. The discussions the characters have about being a woman and how that can be different for different people, women-only spaces and how trans people do (or don’t) affect cis people. I think having these discussions through a fantasy lens was interesting and worked well as you got to see pretty much every point of view (good and bad) that we see in real life but there’s also meaningful discussions and it makes some potentially big ideas more accessible.

I really enjoyed the setting of Her Majesty’s Royal Coven. It’s mostly set in the town of Hebden Bridge (a place I’ve visited a couple of times as one of my best friends lives there), but also a bit in London and Manchester. Having a witchy fantasy novel set in present-day Britain where the characters are all in their mid-thirties felt like this was truly for the British millennials like me. There’s a lot of 90s references as that’s when the girls grew up as well as references to more modern-day issues like Brexit and Covid. It was so nice to read a fantasy novel where the character are adults and have to juggle things like their families, relationships, and jobs while also having magic and responsibilities outside of the “normal” stuff. Plus, how witches and witchcraft is explained to have been a part of Britain (and the world) for centuries helps flesh out this modern interpretation of witches.

I borrowed the audiobook from my library and it was narrated by Nicola Coughlan (of Derry Girls and Bridgerton fame) and she was fantastic. She captures the different voices of the four women so well and makes the exposition just as compelling as when there’s a big action sequence. The final showdown is something I could easily visualise in my mind and was very cinematic. Her Majesty’s Royal Coven is the first book in an adult trilogy and I hope Nicola Coughlan narrates the other books in the series because I’d love to carry on reading these books that way.

Her Majesty’s Royal Coven has compelling characters and relationships and the different kinds of magic is great. It’s a story that’s exciting and thoughtful and packs an emotional punch too. I got really quite attached to a lot of these characters, Elle’s daughter Holly especially, and the ideas of fighting fate and prophecy were interesting too. 5/5.