Vinge is a fantastic writer, and she proves it over and over in the three books I've read so far in this series.

Does this one suffer from bloat? Hell yes, all three do. But this is one of the few authors that can pull it off, because the stuff buried under the bloat is priceless.

While so events turned out to be somewhat predictable, overall, the ride was worth it.

And for all of you that bitched that the book before this was unnecessary, I hope you read this one and have learned to shut your mouths. This one completely validates World's End. ( )

The Summer Queen is as amazingly complex and engaging as the first book in the series, The Snow Queen. I think you could safely skip the novella between them, World's End, since every important event in the first two books is summarized or otherwise alluded to here (fortunately for the reader, since a LOT happens). ( )

Whew, it took me nearly three weeks to read this! That’s unusual for me. For the most part, it wasn’t the fault of the book. I had two weeks of almost non-stop work, with very little down time. More often than not, when I finally sat down to read, some work-related issue would interrupt me and I’d have to put it back down. The third week was better, but still full of work-related distractions. It wasn’t entirely not the book either, though. It did have some slow spots. Combine that with both work distractions and personal distractions and some general restlessness, and there were times when it was difficult to make forward progress. My Kindle edition claims it’s 686 pages, but it took more Kindle page turns for the “real page numbers” to advance as compared to most of the Kindle books I read, so the edition these page numbers were based on must have had a miniscule font. The mass market paperback edition appears to be 949 pages.

This is the third book in The Snow Queen cycle. It picks up directly after the first book, The Snow Queen, and the first part takes place concurrently with the second book, World’s End. In many ways the story continues as you would expect, especially if you read the second book. There were some unexpected things though, and I think those were the parts I liked best.

I was least interested in the parts of the story that followed Moon and her family and had most of the expected plot threads. I still didn’t like Sparks, although I don’t think his behavior followed the natural progression I would have expected from the first book. He did do some interesting things by the end, but he still annoyed me as completely lacking in any personality or self-motivation for most of the book. I just really didn’t like him, and I think by this point there wasn’t much the author could have done to turn that around for me. However, I really enjoyed the chapters that focused on some of the new characters. Reede was especially interesting to me, even after I figured out what was going on with him. I tend to enjoy the troubled, ambiguous characters with a mysterious past. I also enjoyed most of the story surrounding a more familiar character, BZ Gundhalinu. Except when he was with Moon or mooning over her, which got tiresome. I especially enjoyed the parts where he was working with Reede.

I liked the end ok, but it felt a little anticlimactic and maybe a little rushed. I don’t know that it actually was rushed, but it felt that way in comparison with the pace of the rest of the story. All the characters were given a little bit of page time so that we’d know what was going on, and aside from a couple plot points that I never bought into, I felt like we had all the answers by the end. It just seemed like more than a few pages were needed to provide a proper wrap-up.

I did mostly enjoy the book, but it was a struggle at times. I think if I’d had fewer distractions, I would have enjoyed it more because I would have made it through the slower parts more easily. I’m rating this at 3.5 stars but rounding down on Goodreads. There’s one more book in the series, but I think I’m going to stop here. I went and checked the book blurb (a thing I usually avoid doing) and it looks like it’s a side story focusing on BZ and set during the first book. I’d probably enjoy it since I liked his character, but going backward in the story timeline doesn’t appeal to me right now and I’m ready to move on to something new. ( )

I really, really enjoyed Snow Queen, but this book started out very, very slowly. It was very difficult to get through the first couple of chapters, in fact, there's where I paused and haven't picked it back up again. ( )

(Alistair) And now we return to a previously visited universe once again with The Summer Queen, the sequel to the (previously-read and booklogged here; Amy's booklog here) The Snow Queen.

This, alas, isn't quite as good as The Snow Queen. By all rights, it ought to be; it continues fairly seamlessly the plot of The Snow Queen, bifurcated now with Moon Dawntreader continuing her work on Tiamat to grow her world to be able to deal with the Hegemony on more equal terms when they return; and the intrigues in the Hegemony when the secret of starflight is rediscovered enabling them to return much sooner, and the consequences of these actions playing out.

It broadens the scale of the action considerably over The Snow Queen, revealing the secrets behind the mers and the water of life, the intrigues of the Hegemony, and the plotters behind the scenes remaining from Survey, descended from an institution of the old, fallen Empire (about whose fall, also, we learn more and how that ties in to current events). And I think this is in part the problem. I like a complex, sprawling book as much as the next chap, but in this case I think the author lost control of the complexity somewhere along the line, and that shows.

Not that it's not a good book; it is certainly that. But this does hold it back that little bit from being a great book.

( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/cerebrate/2009/06/the_summer_queen_joan_d_vin... ) ( )