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?

Romances, compared to other genres, have some particular problems.  Unlike murder mysteries – where the whole premise is finding out ‘whodunnit’ – the vast majority of romances make it very clear who is going to do ‘it’ pretty much from the outset. Romance delivers the narrative spine of the story, but is not the plot element that delivers the moment of mike-drop twist. What twists exist are about how rather than if the couple end up together. Fantasy, with its scope for magical and political complications expressed in the worldbuilding and character development, offers just that kind of sub-plot surprises and narrative inventiveness that romance cries out for. This, perhaps, is why romance and fantasy are (despite what Jonathan says) not just effective, but almost natural genre-bedfellows.

In Wooing the Witch Queen Burgis starts with the unlikely suitor, Archduke Felix a figurehead of state tormented by his manipulative uncle and recently bereaved by the death of his beloved wife.  With the sudden realisation that he doesn’t care anymore whether he lives or dies he sets out to throw himself on the mercy of his duchy’s enemy, Queen Saskia the ruler of Kitvaria. However, the large cloak he wears leads to him being misidentified as a dark wizard applying for the job of sorting out Saskia’s disordered library. Meanwhile Saskia is convinced by circumstantial evidence and her two fellow queens of villainy that the archduke is the real power on his own throne and so her mortal enemy and the architect of her present difficulties. So the story revolves around Felix trying to hide his identity while serving a queen he is becoming increasingly besotted with, while Saskia plots the ruin of the Archduke not realising that he is the librarian for whom she is conceiving an increasingly overwhelming attraction.

I enjoyed seeing a librarian as a protagonist. Librarians are real heroes for their love of books and the truths within them (come on, its not just Saskia but the world that needs more librarians).  Felix may not be as limber about the shelves as the librarian in Ankh Morpock’s unseen university, but he matches diffidence and diligence in a rather charming way.  It’s interesting how the supposedly irrelevant cultural studies of poetry and music that his uncle/guardian restricted him to, turn out to be of great value in his research into the rhythms and cadences of spell casting. In this – as in other aspects of the book – I detect Burgis taking a swipe at the kind of right-wing cultural bankruptcy that would dismiss the study of the arts because they can’t see an immediate pecuniary profit in it.

In Queen Saskia’s considerable magical powers and in her advocacy for the victimised scapegoats of political expediency, there are parallels to be drawn with a certain wickedly green skinned witch. Like Elphaba, Saskia is not simply a wielder of innate magical talent, but also a passionate woman whose political struggles get in the way of her finding companionship.

Burgis’s prose is speckled with sharp turns of phrase and thought-provoking lines. For example, when Felix is caught in one of those moments of anguished recollection we all have – a previous night’s faux pas brandished in our face by a cruel superego.

Memory lanced him.

Or there is the weighty persona of Saskia’s ogre major-domo impressing on Felix that he must attend a gathering.

“Invited and expected,” Morlokk repeated, with the infinite patience and inevitability of the rock-encrusted mountains he resembled. “Her Majesty made it clear that no refusal was to be tolerated.”

Or flashes of humour when Saskia is contemplating her morning coffee

Ha. Mrs Haglitz had taught the cook here to make proper troll coffee. If it had been any stronger, Saskia wouldn’t have been able to wrestle it out of its pot in the first place.

This is a romance and Saskia and Felix are both given page time to reflect on each other’s attractiveness and the degree to which that has quickened the pulse or stimulated other physiological responses.

Felix

“…still couldn’t stop his gaze from dropping to the curve of her velvet-enclosed waist, so close before him… and the lush, tempting area beneath it.”

While Saskia

“…forced herself to ignore the teasingly exposed hollows of his cheeks under that half mask…and the way an unexpected dimple had appeared along with that rare, mischievous grin.”

I enjoyed the way Burgis played with the power imbalance in her two protagonists – Saskia the indomitable magical queen and Felix cast as her employee. This inversion of the more patriarchal power dynamic made for an interesting change – though one of Saskia’s regal allies does come a bit close to harassing poor Felix as he goes about his work. Indeed, Saskia herself takes some rather drastic steps to delay any revelation from Felix that might spoil their magical moment.

This is perhaps where the characters end up serving the plot, as a story that is about mistaken and concealed identities does rely on some apparent contrivances to keep the truth hidden.  To be fair, one of my early concerns – around the ease with which Felix evaded his uncle’s clutches – was explained before the end.

I first discovered Burgis’s writing with her SPFBO5 entry of Snowspelled – A Jane Austen like imagining of magic and fae mayhem in regency England.  A key motif of that story was a world where men did magic and the women did politics. This was a reaction to the patriarchal misogyny that seemed to overwhelm American politics at the time of Trump’s first election victory in 2016. Within the world building of Queens of Villainy its not too hard to trace another fantasy mirror being held up to contemporary society. Queen Saskia – in embracing the goblins, trolls and ogres – is set on recognising the ‘humanity’ in those people that others would characterise as monsters. It is not just because those were the people who saved her when she fled her murderous uncles power, nor that those were the people who helped her drive out her uncle and reclaim her parents’ throne. It’s that she was taught to recognise their ‘humanity’ by her mother. As various memes have pointed out, no child is born a racist – or as the saying goes in Belfast ‘they didn’t get it from the stones in the street.’

Burgis gifts Saskia a prior sapphic relationship with her beautiful first minister, Mirjana – though working with an ex always brings its challenges.  It is Mirjana who delivers one of the book’s most contemporarily resonant speeches.

“Your parents were progressives, and I truly admired them for their principles. But your uncle built his support base by playing upon real fears within some of the most powerful families in this kingdom. If you want to push forward your own reforms-the ones we agree on, the ones we’ve always wanted-you will have to convince our people that those reforms, and you, are not a threat to their comfortable way of life.”

In Kitvaria, as in our own world, it is those who get their message (whether it’s true or false) most effectively into the minds of people who will win the day (though not the argument).

One interesting aspect to Burgis’s Queens of Villainy trilogy is that each book – while set in the same world – seems poised to follow a different protagonist. While Wooing the Witch Queen is very much Saskia’s story, her allied queens of witchcraft also make significant appearances as part of the supporting cast, and it seems her companion queens will each have a turn at playing the lead in subsequent books. In some ways this is like Kirstin Cashore’s Graceling series, with three different protagonists for Graceling, Bitterblue, and Fire. However, a more accurate comparison would be Natania Barron’s Queens of Fate trilogy.  This feature of Romantasy trilogies having a different romantic pairing in each book is an interesting consequence of the marriage or blending of two genres.  Romance demands the completion of consummation, it’s hungry for that satisfying climax which will leave protagonists and reader breathlessly satiated.  However, fantasy demands the opportunity to return again and again to an intriguing world and revel in the discovered familiarity of its  uncanniness. Katharine Kerr’s Deverry cycle seemed to toy with this romance versus fantasy conundrum by having successive re-incarnations of her lovers make different attempts at an un-star-crossed resolution. But Burgis and Barron have found a different solution to the standalone vs trilogy genre stand-off!

In Wooing the Witch Queen Burgis delivers a fun adventure with two likeable protagonists who spiral towards each other through twists and travails. Within the cosiness of their hesitant courtship, are some sharp observations about our own world.

Wooing the Witch Queen is due for release from Tor on 20th February 2025 – you can pre-order your copy on Bookshop.org