The Queen of Vorn (Unpublished) (Part 2 - Overview)
Welcome back, everyone, to our ongoing review of the unpublished version of The Queen of Vorn.
In this part, we’ll be continuing our overview of the book’s overall qualities. Last time, we discussed background details as well as the Premise, Rating, and the Prose / Editing. This part will cover Plot, Character, and Worldbuilding. We’ll finish out the overview with Part 3 on July 25th, after which we’ll be diving into a chapter-by-chapter breakdown to explore the imbalance of Showing versus Telling in this book.
Thank you all for joining me for this series. Before we dive in, though, I have another disclaimer. This time, it’s about the state of my relationship with the author. While this review and all of its criticisms predate that relationship, I can no longer claim that this is a case of me only understanding an author through his or her work and how he or she chooses to market that work. I have corresponded with Goodwin directly via e-mail, not just via comments exchanged on Twitter.
It’s going to be a bit of a long disclaimer. If you don’t care about that sort of thing, feel free to scroll right down to the Stats and keep on going from there. Everyone else, please bear with me.
DISCLAIMER
The Beta-Read
Charlotte Goodwin is already deep in rewrites for The Queen of Vorn. She put out a request for beta-readers on Twitter at the end of June, and I volunteered. I started reading the updated draft on July 2nd, and I sent my feedback to Goodwin on July 8th.
I will not analyze this new version of the story as part of this review series. Goodwin made it very clear that said version will not be the final edit. I will, however, comment on Goodwin’s potential for improvement.
What I beta-read shows that, purely in terms of skill, Goodwin does have a lot of potential. She made significant changes that at least partially corrected some of the issues that we’ll cover in both this part and Part 3. More work is needed, but already, she’s jumped the book up from a 2/10 to a 4/10. It really wouldn’t be hard for her to get to a 6 or a 7.
Author Reaction
Whether Goodwin has the will to put in the required work is another matter.
I sent my feedback before getting ready for bed on the night of the 8th. Less than a hour later, before I went to sleep, I had Goodwin’s initial response. It was more or less what one would expect of a writer with a professional attitude and a willingness to grow. She expressed concern at the sheer volume of notes I had, but she said up-front that she was going to take my comments with a grain of salt and wait for feedback from others so she could focus on the “common criticisms”. Good on her for that. Given the amount of notes I had, making edits before she got feedback from other people would have been an overreaction. We should celebrate her for keeping a cool head.
It should have ended there.
Within the next hour, Goodwin visited this website, read Chapter 1 of “The Unbottled Idol” and - most importantly - read Part 1 of this review series. She told me as much (more on that in a moment). My analytics confirm that someone with a UK-based ISP did open those pages and wander around the site around that time, so I’m willing to take her at her word.
An hour after that first e-mail, Goodwin sent me a second e-mail that was three times as long. A large chunk of this was dedicated to explaining her version of the Twitter drama. This included attributing her decision to un-publish of the original book to the “pro-Palestine lobby” rather than other indie authors calling her out over the 3-star review thing. The rest was her taking an extremely roundabout path to saying, “Well, I don’t like your writing either. Guess all things are subjective, aren't they?” while also pretending like she wasn't trying to sweep all of my feedback under the rug (including opening the e-mail with a line of false self-deprecation that gave me strong Kawaiiko vibes).
Seven hours after the second e-mail, Goodwin made her first Twitter post since receiving my feedback. Her question is a valid one, and I gave my two cents on the matter (which I’m sharing in the interest of full transparency). However, I find the timing of this particular post … convenient, to say the least.
You all are free to make of Goodwin’s reaction what you will. Personally, I feel like she’s ducking responsibility.
She could have simply left things at that first e-mail, ignored or deleted my feedback, and gone about her day. No one was pointing a gun at her head and ordering her to take some stranger on the Internet seriously. Instead, she went looking for excuses to dismiss criticism. (She admitted as much in that second e-mail, stating that she thought the feedback could be a matter of “style” and wanted to see how our styles “compared’.) For her to then turn around and put so much effort into telling me why she’s viewing the feedback as a subjective take, coupled with crying out to the Internet for permission to selectively ignore feedback, tells me that she’s treating any significant level of criticism like it’s Chaos corruption. She’s building up her Armor of Contempt.
The Real Obstacle
Like I said above, I don’t think skill is what holds Goodwin back. She’s capable of making improvements. Rather, I think that what stands between Goodwin and success is ego. It seems like, much like Yarros, she cares more about being perceived as a good writer and validated as one than she does about actually doing to work to tell good stories.
Recent Reads does not rate books on the basis of the author’s personality. Goodwin’s attitude would have no bearing on this review even if I hadn’t settled on my rating two months ago and finished this review series before she unpublished the book. Nor am I suggesting that we shouldn’t support her future endeavors. I do hope she improves, and I’d love to read a version of The Queen of Vorn that fixes the many issues with the unpublished version. It’s not a bad story. It’s just badly told in its present incarnation.
However, if any references I make to Goodwin in future reviews sound like she’s done a speed run to second place on the list of authors I don’t respect … well. Now you all understand why.
Message to the Author
Mrs. Goodwin, I offered to beta-read your new draft in good faith. My feedback was likewise in good faith. I find the lengths you went to write it off mildly disrespectful. Don’t ask strangers on the Internet for help if you’re going to then look for excuses not to listen to them.
As for this review series that you are trying to dismiss as a “critique”, it delivers the same information as the “fair review” that I left, as a reader, on Amazon. It merely does so in greater detail and in a style that I hope will entertain my readers and/or help us all to improve as writers.
All the criticisms that I have leveled and will level at your writing are well within your ability to correct. You just need to find the courage to do the hard work. I look forward to seeing how your books improve once you do.
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
Rating: 2/10
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.
PLOT
I’d argue that The Queen of Vorn does not actually have a plot until two thirds of the way through the book.
The book does have an inciting incident. It does have clear objectives laid out for its characters. Things happen. The issue, though, is that a plot is more than these things. Events need to flow from what came before and into what comes next. In short, there needs to be cause and effect.
This is where the imbalance of Showing versus Telling starts mangling things.
Goodwin Shows us moments that are decent in isolation for developing character. For example, Chapter 1 establishes that Emma is questioning her life due to vivid dreams of her childhood in Dunia, while Chapter 2 shows Tom’s courage under fire when the base he’s visiting in Afghanistan is attacked, then Chapter 3 introduces Queen Lila on the day she initiates a goblin genocide.
However, from the start of Chapter 6, it becomes clear that these character moments aren’t actually connected to one another. After spending the first few chapters setting up Emma’s amnesia, Goodwin chooses not to actually Show us the moment when her memories are restored. She doesn’t Show us Emma’s reaction to this restored information. Instead, she Tells us about these pivotal moments that define a character and change the trajectory of the plot in the span of two paragraphs.
The Zargons had talked to them for hours. They’d explained that they’d abducted Emma as a child to save her life, wiped her memories, and then placed her into the care of social services on Earth. She’d eventually been adopted, unaware of her origins. They told her they’d taken her memories of her life before she was moved to another planet, but were able to give her them back. Once they did, Emma knew the Zargons’ story was true, as if her identity had clicked into place. She had found out who she was.
The Zargons had shown them images and videos and told Emma all about the world she was from, the kind of details no seven-year-old could possibly know. Emma accepted it all without question, but Tom had taken a little more convincing. But as Emma was able to link her newly restored memories with what they were being told, and the evidence became so comprehensive it was difficult to doubt, he’d started to buy it. Then the realisation hit him: he was married to a princess, and the greatest adventure of his life was staring him in the face.
There are many moments like this throughout the book, but this one is the most significant, and it’s when I realized that this book was in trouble. Goodwin avoids Showing us some of the most vital scenes in this story, both those that drive the narrative and those that serve as a foundation for later moments. Because she Tells us about these important bits, the moments she does Show us don’t actually feel like they’re part of a continuous narrative. They’re just bubbles of time floating aimlessly through an amorphous void. To make matters worse, while the moments she does Show us are fine enough as character moments, they tend not to cover things that are actually relevant to the wider narrative. Emma’s dream and confusion about her identity are set up as her defining traits at the start of the story and then wiped away; Tom’s heroic moment in Afghanistan doesn’t carry over to Dunia; the scenes with Queen Lila just reveal that she and her children exist as people. In a cohesive narrative when Goodwin Showed us those vital scenes, you could cut out all of these things (and, frankly, cut out all of Lila’s chapters entirely) without damaging the story.
Things get so bad, so fast, that Chapter 12 was one of the most boring chapters in this book, despite it being a goblin’s perspective on the aforementioned goblin genocide. As this goblin’s village burned and her neighbors were butchered in front of her, I found myself wondering why I should even bother getting invested in this character. It honestly seemed like Goodwin was just throwing the scene in to wring some emotion from the audience and make it seem like something was happening in the narrative.
Now, I didn’t say that the book has no plot. Starting on page 186 (of 299, as counted by Amazon’s Kindle e-book), a cohesive narrative does develop. Emma is separated from Tom and their traveling companion while they are traveling to a sanctuary where Tom can be trained in magic. The remainder of the book then details the cascade of events as they pair try to reunite, then the consequences of those efforts to reunite kick in, forcing a headlong flight to the sanctuary as hostile forces pursue. This is the only part of the book that was genuinely engaging.
I’ll leave off for now, as Parts 4 through 6 is going to cover this subject in more depth. Just know that the handling of the plot is one of the two ways in which the imbalance of Showing versus Telling destroys this narrative. Far too much of this book is just things happening in a vacuum without a meaningful sense of progression. At least when The Empyrean meanders and spins its wheels, there’s still a sense of connectivity to it all.
CHARACTER
With one glaring exception, the characters of The Queen of Vorn are functional. Not great, not terrible, just suitable for their roles. My main complaint for most of them, continuing on with the imbalance of Showing versus Telling, is that Goodwin prioritizes character moments about things that don’t really seem relevant to the narrative. As much as I enjoyed, say, Tom’s intro chapter in Afghanistan, none of what’s Shown there matters once the story moves to Dunia. His general background of being a soldier matters, but the heroic traits we saw in that scene need to be re-learned, making the scene overall feel pointless.
Tom and Emma
Both of these characters are little more than blank slates. Tom is a British military officer whose pride is often bruised by his struggle to adapt to life in Dunia. Emma is … well, she’s the rightful Queen of Vorn, but outside of that, I honestly couldn’t tell you anything about her outside of her being adopted and being Tom’s wife. The only other thing we know about them is that they are atheists, something Goodwin went the extra mile to tell us in a rather awkward bit of dialogue (despite it having no relevance to the story and being weirdly contradicted later in the story when Emma prays to “the Dunian gods” and concludes that they answered her prayers when something immediately happens). As blank slates, they’re likeable enough, yet that still leaves them as blank slates.
I strongly suspect that Emma is a self-insert for Goodwin. Her hair is described as “mahogany waves”, which matches the hair in Goodwin’s Twitter profile picture. There’s also the matter of Emma’s atheism. Goodwin has Tweeted about her own atheism (unprompted, it seems - I’ll be coming back to that Tweet in Worldbuilding), and the clunky way that she shoehorns this narratively irrelevant information into the book comes across as an effort to put as much of herself into the story as possible (also more on that in Worldbuilding).
Queen Lila
Lila is “the daughter of a Kenyan merchant” who somehow made her way to Dunia and unlocked great magical power as a result. She is ruthless and ambitious, wanting to eradicate the goblins in the name of revenge while also expanding Vorn’s influence across the known world. She has groomed her children to be as ruthless as her, with mixed success. (If those children become relevant to the narrative in future books, I’ll discuss them as well.)
Lila is fine as a villain. My main complaint about her is that, irrelevant as she is to the overall narrative, we really didn’t need chapters from her POV. She should probably have remained this shadowy figure in the background until the second or third book.
Zark
Zark is a Zargon, a member of a species of archetypal Little Gray Men aliens. She was the one who abducted Emma years ago to save her from Lila, and since this violated the Zargon’s version of the Prime Directive, she was punished for it. Now she has a chance to redeem herself by overseeing Emma and Tom’s adventure.
This is a character who is very grating and, much like the Zargons as a whole, completely pointless. She serves as a vehicle for exposition, and despite having deep knowledge on human culture thanks to Zargon monitoring of Earth, acts like someone with zero understanding of humanity whenever Goodwin wants to force some comedy. As I pointed out on The Bastion Discord, every chapter where she is a POV feels like we’re taking a break from an isekai anime to follow around that truck that ran over the protagonist and kicked off the isekai adventure.
Grinthy
This is our only goblin POV character, and every scene featuring her POV actively makes the book worse.
Fully explaining what I mean by this will have to wait until we talk about the Themes, because all of the problems with Grinthy tie into the presentation of the goblin genocide. All I’ll say for now is that I don’t think she was part of Goodwin’s original plans for the narrative. Her chapters seem the least relevant to the story, despite the fact that she is actually part of the events within the section of the book that has a plot. It seems likely that Goodwin got to the end of the book, realized that this story triggered by a goblin genocide doesn’t Show the goblin genocide, and decided to take a random goblin from the climax and give her a backstory as to how she wound up trying to kill Emma. Ironically, because of the damage Grinthy ends up doing, not showing us the genocide in progress and just letting this be an encounter with a nameless goblin would have been the better choice.
WORLDBUILDING
Goodwin claims to have taken “three and a half years” to write this book.
I don’t know what she spent that time on, but it certainly wasn’t the worldbuilding.
Goodwin’s worldbuilding is incredibly derivative, and not in the clever way that Paolini’s is. It’s just bland copy-paste jobs of copies of copies of copies, when she’s not outright ripping things from popular franchises. This situation is preferable to Yarros ramming things into her narrative with zero though of the ripple effects, yet I suspect this is only the case because Goodwin doesn’t try to do anything creative with it and barely leans on the worldbuilding to resolve the plot.
Fantasy
Dunia is a planet of magic that features elves, dwarves, goblins, and humans. Humans native to this world can use magic to a small degree (though this isn’t demonstrated outside of the first third of the book). Humans from Earth, however, can access “earth magic”, which is the power of the elves (if I’m understanding this lore correctly), making them the most powerful sorcerers in all of humanity (if not the world). We see Lila reduce countless acres of forest to a plain of ashes in an explosion that would make even Megumin from Konosuba jealous, and while she does pass out afterwards from the strain, it’s not implied that this was at all dangerous to her health. The whole reason that Tom is along on this adventure is that Emma needs an ally capable of matching the power of Lila (and, for that matter, Lila’s children, who inherited her proficiency with magic).
Outside of that .. the elves are copies of copies of copies of Tolkien’s elves. The dwarves, while never shown, are implied to be the same. The goblins are the copies of copies of copies that came out green instead of brown or red.
All of this is fine. It’s just that, outside of the detail of Tom being able to unlock god-tier magic, there’s not really anything of interest to this setting.
Science Fiction
The Zargons, as mentioned above, are standard LGMs. They are also kitted to the gills with things lifted from popular sci-fi including:
Calling their robots “droids” (Star Wars)
Food replicators, holographic recreation spaces, and a version of the Prime Directive (Star Trek)
The ability to upload whole bases of knowledge into people’s brains (The Matrix)
Drone technology that allows them a nigh-omniscient perspective of events on the worlds they observe (Allegiant)
I say “lifted from” rather than “also in” because Goodwin doesn’t explore or take advantage of any of these elements. They’re used to handwave obstacles at best (such as explaining how Emma and Tom can speak the same language as humans local to Dunia) or as set dressing at worst. All of this feels like it’s included just so Goodwin can point and say, “Look, Sci-Fi things!”
I assume the Zargons will become relevant later in the narrative. Goodwin has already shared cover art for the third book in this trilogy, and there’s a flying saucer on it. However, they are pointless to this narrative. Yes, they are the mechanism by which Emma and Tom move between worlds, but nothing about that could only be accomplished by aliens. Even if the fantastical world is just another planet in the same universe, this transition could have been accomplished through a more magical device. To make matters worse, despite the Zargons not being relevant once Emma and Tom are on Dunia (since their Prime Directive mandates that they sit things out), the story keeps cutting back to Zark’s POV. Nothing narratively relevant happens in these chapters. Zark just banters with her superior officers about exposition or else Tells us about events Goodwin really should have Shown.
The Coping Mechanism Theory
My theory is that the Science Fiction elements exist not for the narrative but for Goodwin. Specifically, I suspect that she couldn’t wrap her head around writing a Fantasy with mystical and magical elements, so she inserted aliens so that she could claim that everything was scientific. This comes back to that awkward scene I mentioned where Goodwin tells us that her characters are atheists.
‘Emma’s planet has a magical field?’
‘In your language, you would call it that, yes. It is the driving force behind all the extraordinary powers or supernatural powers of the advanced species that you might describe as magical.’
‘Cool! So, magic is based on science!’ Tom said giddily.
‘Everything is based on science.’ Zark tilted her head.
‘And yet on earth we think of the supernatural as beyond science, like religion,’ said Emma.
‘Ah, of course!’ Zark replied. ‘I am well aware that humans, and many other advanced species for that matter, tend to invent theologies to explain what they cannot yet comprehend.’ She slapped a hand to her small mouth. ‘My apologies. I hope I have not caused any offence?’
‘Don’t worry, Zark, magic is just something in stories on Earth. You haven’t damaged our beliefs. We’re actually both atheists, anyway. We don’t believe in god.’
‘Ah! Wonderful! As enlightened as a Zargon. Now, excuse me for a few moments while I get this shuttle moving.’
Had Paolini done something like this, I’d call this soapboxing and leave it at that, yet I think there’s more to it than that in this case.
Despite claiming everything is scientific, Goodwin never actually explores that facet of her setting. All the magic is just treated like magic. Even Zark refers to it as magic when speaking with her superiors. Why, then, did she bother saying everything is scientific?
It is possible to have a Science Fantasy setting where the overtly magical coexists with aliens and advanced technology. Young Wizards pulled it off. As we saw in High Wizardry, as well as Wizards Holiday and Wizards at War, alien civilizations acknowledge wizards and magic as something that exists within the fabric of society. The Rirhait species operates an entire interstellar transit hub that uses magical teleportation gates. The closest I can recall to these aliens being dismissive of wizards is that the owner of said transit hub wishes his wizard son would stop wandering the galaxy for charity work and come home to take over the family business. As for the wizards, they see the magic as something scientific, with strict rules, formulas, and data inputs to cast every spell. It’s just that this science involves Powers That Be from outside time and space and a divine mandate from God to fight entropy.
What I suspect happened here is that, much like how Yarros can’t wrap her head around any world that isn’t the Midwestern US, Goodwin can’t wrap her head around a world of the magical, mystical, and/or supernatural. The aliens exist so that she can tell herself that this world operates within the rules as she understands them. That’s why she keeps cutting back to Zark’s POV despite Zark having nothing to do in the story - it’s a self-assurance that she is isn’t writing a story set in a true Fantasy world.
Author Confirmation
I came up with this theory during my first draft of the review, but Goodwin made a Tweet on June 8th (June 9th, where I am, but that’s time difference for you) that really crystallized it for me.
It should go without saying that, outside of confirming that Goodwin is indeed an atheist (which, paired with the forced delivery of Emma’s beliefs, contributes to the interpretation of Emma as her self-insert), the content to this message exceeds the scope of a book review. What I want to focus on here is how she delivered this information.
This Tweet was not a reply to anything, nor did I notice any Twitter drama at the moment that she could be chiming in on. At most, this reads like an author dangling engagement bait (particularly given her other Tweets that same weekend). In delivering this bait, Goodwin made two key decisions that are paralleled within The Queen of Vorn.
Goodwin frames her worldview as a “curse”, an inability to process something beyond her chosen reality. She is professing a limitation to her audience.
She’s putting the focus on herself and her own personal truth, rather than making any argument about science or philosophy or even personal morality.
So … we have an author who has a limited ability to process anything outside of established science (or Science Fiction) … writing a Fantasy novel that goes out of its way to insist that the fantastical elements fit within the limits of science.
She does this … without actually exploring the scientific nature of this supposedly scientific world … instead pivoting to how “enlightened” her self-insert is before calling it a day.
In light of this admission, I really struggle to see how the Science Fiction side of this book isn’t a coping mechanism. It’s not benefitting the story. It’s not explored. It’s just here to establish for the audience (and keep reminding us) that this story conforms to Goodwin’s worldview, and it does so in the same manner that Goodwin herself chooses to express that worldview on social media.
Bad Coping Mechanism, not Coping Mechanism Bad
There’s nothing wrong with an author having coping mechanisms. If an author wants to write a story outside of her comfort zone, and mental gymnastics are needed to take that step, more power to her. Better a coping mechanism than a load of contradictory elements that make the characters feel out of touch with the setting and / or that make the worldbuilding rip itself apart.
The tricky thing about coping mechanisms, like so many other meta elements of a story, is that it needs to be hidden from audience view. Otherwise, we’ll see the hand of the author at work, and that damages immersion. Better yet, rather than just hiding the coping mechanism, the author should take advantage of it to add layers to her story.
Goodwin could have written a story where the ongoing presence of the aliens and the scientific nature of the world could have been an integral part of the story. Off the top of my head, Tom could have used his background as a Royal Engineer, his awareness that the magic is not truly mystical, and the Zargon skill-uploading tech to turn himself into a scientific genius who fully understands the mechanics of the magic system, allowing him to master magic right out the gate (instead of a whole book being spent on him and Emma traveling to people who could teach him). Alternatively, maybe Tom and Emma could come upon some mystical site or magical phenomena that they recognize as Zargon (or some other alien race’s) technology and use basic scientific principles to make use of that technology.
But, no. Goodwin wasn’t interested in any of that. As a result, the kindest thing that can be said about her coping mechanism is that it makes the story feel bloated. This setting has a whole dimension to it that has no narrative relevance and yet repeatedly stops the story to draw attention to itself.
THEME & ANTI-THEME
On July 25th, we will explore the darkest aspects of The Queen of Vorn. It’s time to discuss the mishandling of mature content and the utter failure of themes.
Goodwin tries to use mature content to make her book grittier. While the result is more effective than what we see in The Empyrean, it is still so forced that is actually backfires. Never before have I been outright bored while reading about a genocide in progress. Somehow, Goodwin accomplished just that.
Speaking of genocide …
The narrative of The Queen of Vorn is propelled by genocide. That’s fine on the face of things. Genocide Bad is so ingrained as a value in the West that it’s a very easy way to get the audience on board with opposing a villain. However, Goodwin either takes the audience’s support for granted or was far too ambitious for her own good, because she went out of her way to demonize the victims of said genocide. She actually takes things so far that I started to question why the Zargons felt that this was the genocide that justified their intervention, when they’ve clearly ignored Earth’s history of genocides. It’s such a bizarre knot to untangle … but untangling it is what we’re all here for, so we’ll press on.
POWER AND KNOWLEDGE
On July 18th, we’ll be exploring Chapter 20 of Onyx Storm.
This is the chapter that prompted my Tweet about this book potentially rating 0.5/10. In the name of another power fantasy - one with very clear real-life parallels - Yarros utterly destroys the themes of the series that she has hammered on in the text and proclaimed in interviews. In doing so, she satisfies a prediction I made back in the closing on Iron Flame. We’ll be doing a Spotlight analysis of themes to explore this in full.
In other news, on July 15th, Chapter 3 of “The Unbottled Idol” releases! Now that Mohsen is convinced of Inquisitor Kowsari’s true motivations, the time has come for him to interview the eyewitness who kicked off the investigation. But when Kowsari crosses the line, will he be ready to confront her?
Whatever you’re here for, thank you for stopping by. Please remember to subscribe for the newsletter if you’d like weekly e-mails with the latest posts. Take care, everyone, and have a great weekend.
