The Queen of Vorn (The Homecoming Trilogy, Book 1) (Part 1 - Overview)
Welcome back, everyone.
The Queen of Vorn is a book that popped up on my radar due to Twitter drama (more on that in a moment). I picked it up because I figured I’d do another indie book before I shifted back to more traditionally published content. Little did I realize what I was getting into.
The story of The Queen of Vorn is nothing remarkable. It’s not great, but neither would I really consider it to be all that terrible. If that had been the end of things, this would likely be a standalone review of its pros and cons.
What makes this book truly noteworthy and truly bizarre, though, is how the story is executed. To say that this book is a walking violation of Show Don’t Tell fails to really capture how utterly bonkers the author’s decisions were here. Vital scenes for both plot and character are Told as passing statements (not even Told as a montage, just mentioned) rather than Shown. Scenes that could be assumed to happen in the background or else are utterly irrelevant to the narrative are Shown instead. In the few moments when an important scene is Shown, it has almost no weight, because without those pivotal moments that were Told instead of Shown, there isn’t an adequate foundation for them.
We really need to go into detail to express just how bizarre this book is. Not The Empyrean levels of detail, mind, but we will certainly be putting this book under a microscope. It’s going to be a mad journey.
Let’s get into it.
MESSAGE FOR THE AUTHOR
The author of this book, Charlotte Goodwin (and I’m confident it’s really her, since this is the same Twitter account that was involved in the drama we’ll cover in the next session), followed me on Twitter the day before this review released. If ever there was a chance that the author of a book might actually open one of my reviews, this would be the one. Given that …
Ms. Goodwin, I am a “genuine reader” of this novel. I’ve given you the same fair shot that I give to every author. What follows are my honest thoughts of a book that I did my best to engage with.
If you somehow opened this review and haven’t clicked away already, understand that what follows is not meant to merely bash your already-unpublished book into the dirt. I conduct these analyses to help both myself and my readers learn to be better writers. Callous though the dissection that follows might be, it is also free feedback that you can utilize to the edits that you have already committed yourself to making.
I’m not about to chase you down and demand that you read or implement any of this (though I reserve the right to keep replying to your writing questions on Twitter). Still, it will be here if you wish to benefit from it.
DISCLAIMER / DRAMA
Yes, this is the same book from the Twitter drama where an author complained about someone giving her a 3-star review. Yes, that is why I purchased it.
For those not already aware, Charlotte Goodwin is an indie author who’s been building up a substantial following on Twitter over the last few years. I honestly don’t remember when I followed her; it feels like she’s been in my feed for as long as I’ve been on Twitter. Most of her posts are the typical engagement posts and #writerslift posts that authors building social media followings engage in. Maybe she posts about other things, too, but these are lost in the sea of writing-relating matters.
The Review
On May 8th/9th (I’m several hours ahead of Goodwin, and she seems to post a lot in the late evening for her / early morning for me), Goodwin made a Tweet complaining about a 3-star review.
I didn’t think much of the Tweet when I first saw it. However, over the following week, it stirred up a hornet’s nest on social media. While some people were supportive, most that I saw (i.e. posts from fellow writers in the same space) hammered Goodwin with criticism. The gist of this backlash is that people were in disbelief that any indie writer would feel entitled to only receive 5-star reviews, especially since this 3-star review (which I have not read in full myself) was apparently positive.
Unpublishing
Naturally, with this attention, Goodwin’s book came under intense scrutiny. In the week leading up to June 12th (after I had finished my initial draft of this review), she started making comments on Twitter about being dissatisfied with the book’s reception and about how she was pondering rewrites. This led to the following post on June 11th / 12th.
This was followed up on June 15th / 16th with this announcement.
Within three hours of this Tweet, I checked the Amazon listings. The e-book listing page was completely gone, while the print copy page lists that the book is “Out of Print - Limited Availability” and won’t allow any purchases. (And now I’m kicking myself, because I really should have grabbed a print copy for posterity’s sake when Goodwin announced that she’d unpublish the book.)
My Thoughts
Personally, I don’t care much for all this drama. Given some other engagement bait that we’ll get into later, I’m seriously considering if this was at least partially staged by Goodwin for publicity. Still, I was getting a bit burned out from going through the Magnetic Magic books one after another (I was well into reading the third book, Kin of the Wolf, at the time), so I decided this was as good a book as any for my next indie adventure. On May 13th (four days after Goodwin complained about the 3-star review), I bought an e-book copy of The Queen of Vorn for myself. (If and when a new version of the book is released, I intend to do a second review for that version.)
The review that follows does not take the Twitter drama into account. Yes, Twitter posts can help decipher what an author’s intention for or perspective about the contents of her work. We’ll actually be referencing an unrelated Twitter post by Goodwin to make sense of something when we discuss Characters and Worldbuilding. However, unlike that post, this whole review / unpublishing drama really doesn’t tell us anything about The Queen of Vorn itself. We need to analyze this book on its own merits.
Therefore, outside of this disclaimer, we will not even mention the Twitter drama again, with the exception of:
Any references made to the fact this book was upublished and may someday be rereleased
The final conclusion for this review at the end of Part 6
STATS
Title: The Queen of Vorn
Series: The Homecoming Triology (Book 1)
Author(s): Charlotte Goodwin
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
First Printing: May 2025
Publisher: Self-published to Amazon
SPOILER WARNING
Mild, unmarked spoilers for the entirety of The Queen of Vorn will be provided throughout this review. The first paragraph of any given section will be kept spoiler-free. Any heavy spoilers for this book will be confined to clearly labelled sections.
EDITIONS
This review will specifically focus upon the original release of The Queen of Vorn. It was drafted prior to the unpublishing of the book and only updated to the extent necessary to provide a record of said events, and thus, it applies specifically to the original release.
I do intend to do a comparative review if and when this book is re-released, which will serve as both a critique of the re-release version and an analysis of the changes made.
STRUCTURE
This review got away from me very quickly. There is far more to break down than I realized. My original intent was to do a quick overview and then three parts explore the Show vs. Tell imbalance via a chapter-by-chapter breakdown. However, because the breakdown is meant solely to focus on the imbalance, all of my other notes for the problems in this book ended up bloating the overview to such an absurd length that it demanded a multi-part series by itself. I’m no stranger to writing massive posts, of course, but something about this behemoth overview just didn’t feel right being squeezed into one entry.
So … this is going to be a series of six parts total.
Part 1
Everything we’ve covered thus far
Premise
Rating
Series
Prose / Editing
Part 2
Plot
Character
Worldbuilding
Part 3
Content Warning
Theme
Part 4: Show vs. Tell Imbalance, Chapters 1 through 12
Part 5: Show vs. Tell Imbalance, Chapters 13 through 22
Part 6: Show vs. Tell Imbalance, Chapters 23 through 33 & Conclusion
This is going to take up all of my non-Onyx Storm Friday slots from now until late September … so that we can start the multipart series for The Will of the Many in October. Apologies in advance for the drought of one-short reviews. We’ll get one for Kin of the Wolf at the end of the September, and then we’ll do a handful at the end of the year.
PREMISE
The follow is the premise from both the Kindle e-book produce page and the Amazon listing for the physical copy.
A queen without a throne, a sorcerer without magic, a usurper bent on genocide...
With Emma hidden on Earth for her safety, Queen Lila holds the power to Emma’s throne, and she’s using it for genocide. She has the magical strength, she has the political power, and the only woman who could stop her is thousands of lightyears away.
No one on Dunia knows Queen Lila is from Earth. No one knows it’s why she’s the most powerful sorcerer the planet has ever seen. Except the Zargons. They watch, they study, they don’t interfere; except one day, one of them did, and it’s time to interfere again.
Emma is the only one who can stop Queen Lila, but the Zargons know if Emma is to succeed, she’ll need help. Her husband, Tom, has a potential he never knew - a potential to wield magic. Together, they must travel across the galaxy, find Tom’s magic, and save the homeland she never knew existed, until now.
Originally, I was going to link the Kindle e-book page so that you could see the listing for yourselves, but since that’s gone, please accept the physical copy listing instead. If this page is also gone by the time you read this, I apologize for the dead link.
Reaction
This is premise only covers the Call of Adventure (to use Hero’s Journey terminology). That means it only tell the reader what to expect in the first eight chapters of this 33-chapter book.
Still, that does mean that it is accurate. No false promises are being made, and nothing is being exaggerated. Goodwin (and I assume Goodwin herself wrote this premise, since this was self-published) kept her promises simple and fulfilled those promises.
Unfortunately, as we covered while reviewing The Demon’s Eye, keeping promises is not the same as writing a good book.
RATING: 2/10
As stated while reviewing The Empyrean, a 3/10 is the lowest score where I consider a book to be bad but still relatively sound in its construction. Scores from 1/10 to 2/10 are stories that are those were the story is actively at war with itself and/or cannibalizing prior entries in the series. The Empyrean falls into this pit because its plot, character and worldbuilding constantly find new ways to disrupt one another, an issue further aggravated by Yarros prioritizing herself over the integrity of the narrative.
The Queen of Vorn falls to these depths for a different reason. Much like The Demon’s Eye, the bulk of this story is coherent if one were to outline the events and the character arcs that Goodwin seemed to be going for. This issue is that, much like the Star Wars Prequel films, a potentially good story is mangled in execution.
Most of the problems here come down to the Showing versus Telling problem that we’ll be covering over the next few weeks. Goodwin either fails to deliver the groundwork for the payoffs or arcs she wants or else wastes time on things that don’t benefit her story (like a POV character who actively makes the story worse every time she’d in focus). However, there’s also a general sense of sloppiness to everything. The world uses tropes and archetypes as a crutch, characters rush through arcs, and the urgency of the initial premise is swiftly forgotten as the plot (if one can call it that) meanders forward.
There’s also the awkward fact that Goodwin justifies a genocide while also using the opposition to said genocide to provide a moral drive for the story … but but that’s a discussion for Part 3.
SERIES
Planning Ahead
Goodwin included a preface for this novel. Within it, she briefly explains the history of how she came to write The Homecoming Trilogy and its sequel series, The Offspring Trilogy. She also states that “all six books are written and will be released at three-month intervals, starting with The Queen of Vorn on 2nd May 2025”.
As you might imagine, I was of two minds on this even before Goodwin unpublished The Queen of Vorn.
I genuinely do admire that Goodwin has not only the passion but also the forward-thinking to actually write out the series in advance. I’m tired of books that were clearly written as standalones, only to have sequel bait crowbarred into the end to force a series; I also don’t appreciate authors who commit to a series while making it very clear that they have neither the ideas to fill that series nor the dedication to actually plan that series out. Goodwin went the extra mile here.
The inverse of this, though, is that Goodwin left herself no margin to adjust to audience feedback. If she hadn’t abandoned her release timeline, she’d have been locked into what she’d already written, with barely enough time to make superficial changes in response to reader feedback. Maybe The Offspring Trilogy could be salvaged, but Goodwin would have needed to work very, very fast. It’s possible that this contributed to Goodwin unpublishing The Queen of Vorn. She may have seen the feedback and realized that she simply couldn’t fix the later books in time, and if she was already abandoning her release schedule, that made it all the easier to simply unpublish The Queen of Vorn and edit it as well.
Volume 1
Much like The War of Souls, The Homecoming Trilogy is really one long story split into multiple volumes. The Queen of Vorn is just Volume I of the tale. As a result, this book is entirely setup for the books that come after it.
Goodwin mostly handled this well. She ends the book at a natural stopping point rather than an arbitrarily ending things or stretching it until it outstays its welcome. She also frames Emma and Tom’s story around getting Tom trained, providing a milestone within the broader narrative for this book to hit.
However, even more so than the War of Souls, there are characters who only seem to be in this book because it is Volume I. The chapters with Lila and her children don’t drive the story, making it seem like Goodwin just wanted to introduce these characters for the sake of a later installment. There’s likewise an antagonist, Grinthy, whom I suspect only was added as an afterthought because Goodwin wanted to give Emma a final boss fight to shore up the ending without needing to reposition Queen Lila for that purpose.
It’s hard to really say more about The Queen of Vorn’s role in the series without reading the later books. Still, setting aside the flaws of this book, I think it works fine as an opener to this series.
PROSE / EDITING
Proofreading
The prose in this book is hideously rough. There are typing mistakes all over the place, ones that make even my blog’s patching editing seem like a masterpiece. What I find particularly baffling, though, is that the mobile version of the the book includes at least a dozen phrases in bold that start in Chapter 22 and recur throughout the next few chapters. It’s not done for emphasis, and there no other evident pattern to it; in at least one case, the bold text starts in the middle of a word. I’m baffled that Goodwin missed these. These examples make up less than half of the pages where this problem appears.
There is, however, one mistake that isn’t so much a flaw as it is funny. (I will put the mistake in bold, as I want to give you full context for it first, but it was not in bold in the original text.)
‘Goblins,’ Garrad drew his sword, ‘wait here.’ He set off into the undergrowth.
‘We can’t let him go alone,’ Emma whispered to Tom. She strung her bow, slung her quiver of arrows over her shoulder, and set off after the general.
‘Emma!’ She heard Tom call after her. She ignored him. She glanced over her shoulder, he was following, she knew he would.
Garrad’s trail of trampled pants was easy enough to follow.
Bear in mind that this book is written in British English, so if you are envisioning a trail of white briefs scattered on the ground, you are fully right to do so.
Voice
The different POV characters in this book all use the same narrative voice … with the exception of Grinthy. I was originally going to praise this, as it helps capture the feeling that Grinthy is a goblin rather than a green human, but this feeds into the problem with the portrayal of the goblin genocide that we’ll get into in a moment.
The humor in this book, much like the violence, feels very forced. Most of it at the start of the book involves the Zargons failing to understand anything about the species they spent their lives observing. The rest comes from banter, particularly between Emma and Tom, that is inoffensive in isolation but does start to feel obligatory after a while. If Goodwin really wanted to balance out the grim and gritty aspects of the story, I feel like she should have just used less of them, rather than forcing humor to compensate for forced edginess.
CHARGING FORWARD
On that note, I will end this part here. Thank you so much for bearing with me for this new series. There will be new lessons for us to learn in the parts ahead, so I hope you’ll join me.
Part 2 will explore the Plot, Character, and Worldbuilding. I should have very little to say about these. On the surface, what Goodwin has done with these elements is unremarkable. However, digging a little deeper, and it’s clear that how much of a mess the imbalance of Showing versus Telling has caused. Goodwin’s efforts to use Emma as a self-insert character also end up giving us a peak behind the curtain, hinting that a certain element of the narrative that contributes next to nothing may actually be a coping mechanism to help Goodwin wrap her head around writing this story.
It’s coming your way on July 11th. I hope you’ll join me.
UNTIL THEN
On July 4th, we’ll be getting our next Spotlight analysis for Onyx Storm. Chapter 19 provides the perfect opportunity to discuss the demonization of characters within this book. Let’s dig deep and look as how Yarros tries to force interpretations of her characters that don’t line up with the information she’s provided.
Also, a quick reminder that on this upcoming Tuesday, my web novella “The Unbottled Idol” will premiere with Chapter 1 of 13!
Mohsen Yavari's task within the Imperial Inquisition was simple: monitor the gods' activities in the mortal world. When a diplomat is killed by a goddess, a maverick inquisitor recruits him for her investigation. Their search for answers will lay bare sinister truths, with a child’s soul hanging in the balance.
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