Beneath the Keep is the prequel to the Queen of the Tearling series where we follow a few characters for the year before Princess Kelsea is born. I just recently finished all of the books from the series for the first time and loved them all so much, I knew I needed to get my hands on this prequel when I saw that it was not a short story. We mainly follow Princess Elyssa , Lazarus, Thorn, The Fetch, The Rebellion, and a little of Prince Thomas.

We are going to start with complaints because I only have one real one. I did not like the narrator. I picked up the audiobook on my own as this is how I had read all of the previous books, and once again we got a narrator change. She felt unemotional and lifeless. I still ended up really enjoying the book (as you can tell from my rating) but that was with me struggling to ignore how the narrator was telling the story.

My not real complaint is this story wasn't what I was expecting/wanted. You find the reason that a lot of the characters in the three original books are the way they are or make the choices them make, but I felt like they were already perfect characters that changing their motivation didn't help me enjoy this world any more. My main thought on this is Kelsea's mother, Queen Elyssa. We get to see a lot of how she because this person the people hate, but I didn't want to like Elyssa, or have her be anything more than a vampent queen only caring about herself and her looks. This world allowed for so many types of people and I felt like it was great to have both the good and the bad in power, but now with this addition of the prequel, your made to view some of the bad as more good. But this was me fulling putting my expectations onto a story that I did not write, so I view it as not a real thing to complain about.

Now let's discuss the good.
The Writing
The Cruelty
The Characters
The Hopelessness
THAT ENDING
Answers to questions the original series left us
Having more of this world

I'm going to have to bullet these because once again I fell in love with this book and would sit here forever writing about why it is amazing, when I really just want to tell you to go read it!

This book would be appropriate to read after finishing any of the previous ones, you don't need to have finished the series. It does have lots of trigger warnings and is an ADULT fantasy. I highly recommend if you like anything by Erika Johansen.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!