I loved this book. The flowing writing style makes it a fast and easy read. While the foreshadowing makes some of the plot predictable, the characters more than make up for it. Wint and Jerilyn started off arrogant but I grew to love them. Frederick and Claude are characters you will love to hate. Here's a basic outline of the plot: Wint is drawn into his family's intrigues by his father, the duke. He has to keep the family sword Scamoral from his uncle, Lord Claude, after Claude captures the duke's castle. Wint overcomes various obstacles and meets new friends while on the run. Before the fall of his home, Wint found himself caught between childhood and adulthood, now he must quickly grow more mature to survive. This book had a pleasant ending that didn't leave me hanging. I enjoyed reading it.

After reading The Sword, The Ring, and The Chalice Trilogy, I couldn't wait to read The Queen's Gambit. However, this book really disappointed me. I expected this one to be as good as the trilogy, but I was wrong!
This book starts out pretty good. It keeps the readers going by talking about how Pharesa is weak and is in a dangerous situation. However, I expected Pharesa to get stronger and stronger as the plot flows. Pharesa is a whiny wife who doesn't want to turn against her husband until it's too late. Chester should develope Pharesa's personality more, but she didn't. So in the end, I still think Pharesa as a weak woman.
Also, we didn't get a lot of information about Talmor's personality except that he's brave and loyal. Chester could go a little bit beyond that.
Some events in the novel come out too suddenly. For example, Pharesa realizes her love for Talmor in just like a blink of eyes, and there's not a lot of foreshadowing before this abrupt realization. I think Chester could make the characters closer before having them admit their love to each other. Moreover, Chester should write more about the life of Dain.
Well, this is my opinion. I personally think it's not worth to buy this book. It is interesting to know what's Pharesa's life like after The Chalice, but I really wouldn't buy it if I were you.

I was looking forward to this book wrapping up some of the dangling threads from The Sword/Ring/Chalice trilogy. Not only were my questions not answered, I am now left with many more dangling plotlines.

I found Pheresa to be a weak, whining character who doesn't begin to buck up until almost the end of the book and is definitely not deserving of her love interest, who, by the way, is about fifty times more interesting than she is. Very disappointing, although I enjoy Chester's style. Quite disappointing for a book I was very much looking forward to.

I'll be blunt, I didn't think there was a lot of depth to this book. I didn't think that there was much depth to her other books either, but this one had even less. This was not your typical "quest" story, so if you need your characters to go on a more physical quest, I'd reccomend against this book.

I think that the book actually started out pretty good. Pheresa wasn't and isn't the strongest character around, which made me like her a little and made the story interesting. I guess I felt like it was almost her quest for self-realization. She's a bit shallow, as she was in the previous books, but well-meaning and likable. She makes the mistake of thinking that strength comes from the power to make orders. She grows and matures in the story which I liked and for the most part, I thought was done nicely. I have to say that the author rode a fine line in the climatic scene where she takes the throne back. It could have easily been anti-climatic, but the confrontation between her and Lervan was, in my opinion, well-done.

However, I had two major problems with this book. First, there was really no room for character development in Talmor because he was more or less perfect. It was a bit sickening. His "flaws" weren't really flaws, they were flaws of the "world" for lack of a better word, who couldn't or wouldn't understand him and who later realized the error of their ways. Second, the feminist in me was pretty disgusted at the scene where Pheresa was willing to run away from the crown and go away with Talmor. She had a responsibility and she was too weak to get it without Talmor's emotional support (Of course, Talmor realized that he couldn't ask that of her). I was very disappointed in that. I felt that it took away from who she could have been. Had that whole scene been downplayed, or just replayed differently, I would have felt that Pheresa had truly become the strong person she wanted to be, who I felt the author wanted her to be and who I wanted her to be. What i wanted of her was for her to realize that strenght didn't mean doing everythig on her own, she could have leaned on Talmor or others, BUT it also means that she is not useless without those others. I know I'm going on and on about that, but I feel it detracted from the story a great deal as well as made her victory over Lervan a little hollow. Otherwise, it was a book that despite my disappointment in her, I enjoyed. Maybe a follow-up book where she continues her growth? Or maybe I should just be happy with what was there :>

This was a very dissapointing ending for the ruby throne trilogy. I just loved and enjoyed the cat-fights, hair-pulling, and action in the first book (REIGN OF SHADOWS) but REALM OF LIGHT WAS SOO BORING, there was no conclusion at all. The death and rise of people were bluntly developed, it seemed as though Deborah Chester just sped throught this just to finish the third planned book, so she could work on her next trilogy. Oh, well...just hope another better book comes out in the meantime.

I enjoyed the first two books in the series. I was fascinated by the background of the empire and the characters that made it up. There were several plot developments revolving around characters that I found very intriguing: Hecati, Bixia, Agel, the jinji, the Magria and so on. For instance, we left her half-sister Bixia screaming that she would do everything in her power to bring the empress down. So, here we are in the conclusion and we never even see Bixia again, let alone have her try anything to ruin her life. The author focuses a great deal on minute details, then forgets the big picture. The emperor is mentioned almost as an aside that he is dead. What happened? We get about one sentence that the magria is dead and has been replaced by a former deputy that she had removed from office due to flaws. What happened? We never find out. We spend pages and pages focusing on the empress reaching Albania and her father, and all her attentions are concentrated on saving his life so that he could lead his armies to put her on the throne. Everything is about to come together, and then she's basically arrested and carted off to the capital with her family who have no real part in the rest of the story. No armies. Nothing. She earns the respect of a dragonrider who pretty much seems set to bring her an army of dragonriders, and we never see him or another dragon again. She wanted a jinji from the very first book, and she finally gets one. She even gets one that is unusually colored and matches her topaz colors, then all we get from the jinji is it piping up a couple of times that danger approaches. Well, duh. He never uses his peculiar skills that I wanted to learn more about to sense and draw off magic. We didn't need the jinji to tell us that. Too much detail was focused on petty humiliations and not enough on the real meat of the story. I was very disappointed at the lack of conclusion for this series. I feel as though I wasted my time reading the first two, which were much better than the last. I wish that the author would have extended the series to at least a fourth book to fully develop all the characters, then I would have been one happy reader.

This book was an excellent read. The characters were excellently protrayed. And man there were so many twists and turns in the story it made me pleasently dizzy! Elandra and Caelan's relationship is very vivid and lifelike. I could feel the love they had!

My only problem is that the ending of the climax of the book had Caelan so different from the rest of the book and the series that it seemed a little too far fetched. All in all this was one of the best conclusions to a trilogy I have read in a long while.