Asian American Literature Fans

A Review of Zen Cho’s The True Queen (DAW 2019)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

Zen Cho’s The True Queen (DAW 2019) was on my highly anticipated list due to Cho’s earlier publication Sorcerer to the Crown. The True Queen is not a direct sequel to Sorcerer to the Crown, though Prunella Wythe (formerly Prunella Gentleman) and other characters do return. We’ll let B&N give us some background at this point: “When sisters Muna and Sakti wake up on the peaceful beach of the island of Janda Baik, they can’t remember anything, except that they are bound as only sisters can be. They have been cursed by an unknown enchanter, and slowly Sakti starts to fade away. The only hope of saving her is to go to distant Britain, where the Sorceress Royal has established an academy to train women in magic. If Muna is to save her sister, she must learn to navigate high society, and trick the English magicians into believing she is a magical prodigy. As she's drawn into their intrigues, she must uncover the secrets of her past, and journey into a world with more magic than she had ever dreamed.”

So this particular novel focuses much more on the Malaysian side of the equation. When Sakti and Muna are traveling to Britain through a shortcut that requires them to move through the Fairy dimension, Sakti disappears. Once Muna arrives there, she realizes that she is essentially stuck there, without her mentor Mak Genggang, a highly powerful witch who was mentoring Sakti and Muna. One of the rules of Fairy is that it’s much harder to travel to that realm from the British side than it is on the Malaysian side, so Muna must use her allies in Britain to help devise a way to find Sakti. The other major storyline involves the Fairy Queen, who has lost a magical item known as the Virtu. The Virtu is essentially a kind of amulet that has been broken into two; it is essential for the Fairy Queen because she wants to consume it in order to take its power into her. The Fairy Queen is worried that there is an insurgency rising up against her and fears it may be stemming from sources in Britain.

The two plots collide once one of the Fairy Queen’s henchman (the Duke of the Navel of the Seas, I think his name was) arrives at the Sorceress Royal’s academy demanding the Virtu, otherwise killing everyone there. While Prunella and others work to appease the Duke, Muna and one of the other instructors (Henrietta Stapleton) have traveled to the Fairy dimension to save an imprisoned figure, who possesses information that may be crucial to figuring out the location of the Virtu and to dispelling the wrath of the Fairy Queen. I may have gotten some plot points imprecise for which I apologize, but frankly, I had a much harder time following this novel than the last one. I also have to put in some spoilers here because the novel starts really picking up toward the end.

The biggest mystery that the novel poses is the identities of Sakti and Muna; when they wash up on the beach on Janda Baik, they have no idea who they are and neither does the reader. Cho’s biggest trick in this novel (at least from my readerly perspective) is keeping us off the scent of who they actually are and why their powers are so different. At some point, given what Muna learns in the Fairy realms she begins to believe that Sakti is none other than the “true queen,” a serpent-figured fairy that is going to take back the throne from her sister, the current Fairy Queen, but what Muna and others eventually discover is that Sakti and Muna are not unlike the Virtu, as when the “true queen” was banished from the Fairy realms, she was also split into two. Muna became the “bodily” and “material” portion while Sakti was the “spiritual” and “magical” portion. Muna must eventually make a crucial decision about how to bring about the union of Sakti and Muna, with or without their ability to remain separate entities.

This concluding arc is where the novel was most richly engaged (at least from me), but I will say I was somewhat disappointed by Cho’s choice to move in this direction. Prunella was such a fun and comic character that I had hoped to read much more about her adventures. The last novel also leaves us with the question of how Prunella would be raising her familiars, which goes almost entirely untouched in this second work. Let’s hope she returns to Prunella’s time as the Sorceress Royal, so we can see how she deals with being her own “queen of the dragons.”

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu