Feeling rejected, Charlie, an artist, is drawn into a destructive new relationship with her sexy older co-worker, a 'semifamous' local musician who's obviously a junkie alcoholic. But things don't go as planned in the Arizona desert, because sweet Mikey just wants to be friends. After spending time in treatment with other young women like her-who cut, burn, poke, and otherwise hurt themselves-Charlie is released and takes a bus from the Twin Cities to Tucson to be closer to Mikey, a boy she 'like-likes' but who had pined for Ellis instead. Seventeen-year-old Charlie Davis, a white girl living on the margins, thinks she has little reason to live: her father drowned himself her bereft and abusive mother kicked her out her best friend, Ellis, is nearly brain dead after cutting too deeply and she's gone through unspeakable experiences living on the street. Scholte’s stand-alone debut marks her as an author to watch.Īfter surviving a suicide attempt, a fragile teen isn't sure she can endure without cutting herself. Most characters are white like Keralie Varin has dark hair and tan skin, and two of the queens are dark-skinned. The distinctive characters-strong queens and wonderfully flawed Keralie-are as appealing as the murder-mystery plot.

The inventive worldbuilding, though occasionally superficial, features vastly different quadrant cultures (e.g., one high tech, one without electricity). This structure relies on timeline manipulation, which is deftly handled and results in exponential payoffs the deeper into the book the reader gets. Other than Keralie’s, the other viewpoints in the book are close third-person following the queens, revealing palace secrets and their grisly ends while they try to find the assassin, interspersed with Varin and Keralie’s efforts to stay alive while figuring out what to do with the information they have.

In each of Quadara’s four quadrants, a queen lives and rules, following strict laws.

When Varin, the messenger, who has a degenerative eye condition, coerces Keralie into helping him recover them, they run afoul of Mackiel and-as a power play-Keralie ingests the comm chips, receiving memories of Quadara’s queens being assassinated. Keralie, a top thief working for her childhood friend Mackiel, steals a case of comm chips-technology that holds embedded memories and implants them in another person’s mind-from a messenger. A thief is endangered by accidentally acquired regicidal evidence.

Astrid scholte four dead queens