The Scarecrow Queen is the third and final book in The Sin Eater’s Daughter trilogy. The first book followed Twylla- the sin eater’s daughter of the title – while the second book follows Errin, the sister of one of the characters in the first book. This book has points of view from both characters to help finish the story.

“I thought we’d be like an avenging army in a story. I imagined people rallying to our cry, and that the fact we were on the side of good would assure our victory.”

The second book set up the return of the sleeping prince – a prince who is now awake and wants to take his throne back leading to war and both Twylla and Errin have important parts to play in stopping the sleeping prince. The best parts of the book are the parts that focus on belief and how belief works – Twylla, who in the first book believed she had the ability to kill people with a single touch (now knowing that’s not true) uses people’s belief of her as someone sent from the gods to become a leader of a rebellion movement against the prince.

We also learn more about why exactly the world in the books has sin eating, why Twylla must be the next sin eater and how even this ritual has a human beginning with the belief of gods coming much later and being added to the already existing tradition.

“Scarecrow queen. Nothing but a dupe, alone in a field, hoping to keep the crows at bay.”

Even though the series is mainly focussed on Twylla, I would have liked to see more of Errin’s point of view as she only gets a couple of chapters in the middle of the book from her point of view. After having a whole book focussing on her it seems as a if a lot more of her life during the third book could be explored.

“Death always seemed so easy, I would read stories full of brave warriors and assassins and how they would deliver speedy deaths, and then walk away. They’d go to the taverns and drink with their friends, or go home to their lovers. They never said anything about how they felt afterwards.”

The whole trilogy of books focuses on belief, how beliefs come about, how they change, how people stop believing in things and what happens if something that everyone has dismissed as a fairytale turns out to have more than a few elements of truth. That being said the book also contains alchemy which is shown as a science, albeit a science that only certain people can learn, and for all the talk of how stories differ from the truth of things, the main thought I took away from the books was – just because something’s not a story doesn’t mean it’s not magic.

The Sleeping Prince is the second book in The Sin Eater’s Daughter trilogy by Melinda Salisbury.

This book follows Errin and while the first book had a character learning that things she believed to be true were not, in the interim between books Errin has had to learn that things she believed were stories are in fact true.

“Once upon a time there was a young apprentice apothecary who lived on a red-brick farm with a golden thatch roof, surrounded by green fields.”

There is an old fairytale of a Sleeping Prince who awakes every hundred years to eat a heart, if he awakes at a certain time then he will go forth into the world and try to claim his throne, killing anyone who stands in his way. This of course, is just a fairytale until it comes true.

“Fortune favors the bold.” I smile weakly. “So does death,””

The Sleeping Prince was mentioned and indeed awoken in the first book, although only towards the end, so this story is the one where the main plot of the trilogy gets underway.

Much of the story of the prince is either told to the reader slowly over the course of the book or we are told different versions as everyone seems to have their own version of the fairytale, while this does make sense for a fairytale – just imagine if Cinderella was suddenly proved real, the confusion between people looking for glass shoes and squirrel fur shoes and others arguing about what “fairy godmother” could possibly refer to outside of a story book would be incredible – it can also be confusing to the reader not knowing which one they’re supposed to believe in – as far as I can work out we are supposed to believe the alchemists version as they are descendants of the sleeping prince’s sister.

“The apothecary, the monk and the living Goddess went to war. We sound like the start of a joke.”

The book sets up the third book neatly, showing clearly how everyone ends up where and why, and how all the characters from the first two books – they followed entirely different people – connect to each other and as soon as I had finished the second book I went to buy the third book in the series The Scarecrow Queen so I could read it straight away.