She’s the One Who Can’t Keep Quiet – 5 Star Review

Do you know what your problem is?

Welcome to one of the February 10th stops on the blog tour for She’s the One Who Can’t Keep Quiet by S. R. Cronin with Goddess Fish Promotions. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for 6 more reviews and a giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.

If you frequent this blog then you already know I’m a huge fan of this series, but just in case:

• Book 1: She’s the One Who Thinks Too Much – 4 Star Review
• Book 2: She’s the One Who Cares Too Much – 4 Star Review
• Book 3: She’s the One Who Gets in Fights – 5 Star Review, Excerpt Tour
• Book 4: She’s the One Who Doesn’t Say Much – 5 Star Review, Excerpt Tour
• Book 6: She’s the One Who Won’t Behave – Cover Reveal

Please note that this post contains affiliate links, which means there is no additional cost to you if you shop using my links, but I will earn a small percentage in commission. A program-specific disclaimer is at the bottom of this post.

About the Book

She’s the One Who Can’t Keep Quiet
War Stories of the Seven Troublesome Sisters Book Five
by S. R. Cronin

Published 14 January 2022
Cinnabar Press

Genre: Historical Fantasy
Page Count: 245
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

Do you know what your problem is?

Celestine, the fifth of seven sisters, is tired of hearing about hers. Father thinks she’s frivolous because she likes pretty clothes and caters to the crowds in the taverns who adore her music. Mother thinks that because she’s the most social daughter in the family, she can’t keep quiet about anything.

They’re both wrong. Celestine hides a secret she has kept for most of her life.

As the family beauty and a talented musician with a lyrical voice, she has the best prospects for marriage to a prince. When such a liaison never happens, people assume Celestine is too choosy. But even in somewhat tolerant Ilari, a daughter hates to disappoint her family. How can she tell them she’s in love with a princess instead?

Lucky for Celestine, all her sisters are obsessed with an invading army headed to their realm. Celestine would rather ignore the threat and enjoy the freedom their lack of attention gives her. But, her voice can unlock a power that may help save Ilari. And the woman she loves is determined to fight these invaders. And her family, for all their talents, seems clueless about how to motivate the masses.

Celestine knows she can inspire the citizens of Ilari to do what needs to be done. Is it time to put her inhibitions aside and use her voice to save those she cares about?

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Excerpt

When Zamarran didn’t show up on time for practice two anks later, I worried. When he arrived at our inn well after the late Tirga sunset, I met him with harsh words about being dependable. Then I looked closer.

His dusty, tired face showed signs of riding for days. That made no sense. Zamarran lived in Faroo, an easy quarter of a day’s ride away.

“Where’ve you been?” I asked. He reached for a mug of ale on the table and downed it in one swallow. It was Feene’s but Feene didn’t say a word.

“K’ba,” Zamarran said. “Heli, it’s a long hot ride out to those settlements and back.”

“What were you doing in K’ba?” Mirva asked.

“Trying to turn our music into a full-time job. But, much to my surprise, the K’basta needed little persuasion to pay to hear us.” He gave me a funny look. “They’ve heard about the amazing Celestine all the way out there.”

“They have?” This was wonderful news. Over the past decades, K’ba had turned its barren settlements into a haven for entertainers of all sorts and now their performances enticed Ilarians out to the otherwise desolate Canyon River. A quartet that could split its time between exotic K’ba and the taverns of Pilk would be well-off indeed.

“What do they say about me?” I asked.

“Mostly that your superb music is only surpassed by your beauty and charm.”

Those flattering words filled my head that night, leaving no room for worry about how the others felt.

My Review

My Rating: 5 Stars
Consider liking my review on Goodreads

I was granted complimentary access to She’s the One Who Can’t Keep Quiet as part of my participation in a blog tour for this title with Goddess Fish Promotions. Thank you to all involved in affording me this opportunity! My thoughts are my own and my review is honest.

I’ve been a fan of this series since book one and I’ve reviewed each as they publish, but it was the third book that really won me over and started a string of 5-star ratings. Why? That book took what was already a great magical realism sort of historical fantasy with a compelling impending war plot full of strong female leads and added in an LGBTQIA+ aspect that was handled so beautifully. This book continues that spirit.

For those who are unfamiliar with the series, the War Stories of the Seven Troublesome Sisters are a series of companion novels covering the same timeframe leading up to the Mongol invasion of a fictional middle eastern country called Ilari. Ryalgar, the eldest sister, found love and reluctant rejection with a prince and devoted her life to a group of forest-dwelling witches known as the Velka, and it’s these women with Ryalgar in the lead who are rallying the common folk of Ilari in an epic effort to assist the military to save their home. With each new book in the series we’re introduced to another sister in descending age order, as the new POV character, and discover how each sister will play a critical role in this plan. Each sister possesses her own unique form of magic and each is vital to Ilari’s survival.

In Can’t Keep Quiet we meet the second of the twins, Celestine, whose powerful singing voice is quite literally full of magic. She can infuse intent into her melodies and sway a crowd, a person, animals, any living being listening, to feel or act any way she pleases. She’s also head over heels in love with another woman, her former astronomy teacher, and a colleague of her father’s.

For readers who’ve read the previous four books I don’t think this one adds a lot to the world-building that wasn’t already established, aside from more details on how Celestine’s powers work, but it does so much work in terms of making the characters we haven’t learned as much about more real and well-rounded. I loved getting to know Celestine as this book’s POV character, and she presented a unique perspective to get to know a little more about the youngest two sisters we haven’t properly met yet. (I’ve been looking forward to book six ever since book two made me realize what this series would be like because I REALLY want to get inside Gypsym’s head!) Besides the sisters, however, while the previous book really made the sisters’ father a more layered character, this one reveals a lot more about their mother. My heart breaks for this woman all over again. We’ve known since book one that she didn’t feel supported by her mother in law when she became a mother, and that’s a pain I regretfully share with her, but it goes deeper. This woman was asked to give up everything that made her a happy, unique individual in order to become a mother and a wife only to watch her husband celebrate those things that made her unique when their daughters started to share those qualities and interests. This is a pain I think far too many mothers share and as sad as it is, it’s refreshing to see it addressed so honestly in fiction.

As for the lesbian romance, I both love and love to hate how it plays out. While the gay, bisexual, and demisexual orientations and gender binary smudging relations and plot points of the third book were mostly positive and so well accepted (or politely ignored) by surrounding characters, these women face ignorance and hate from some circles. It’s less rosy and happy, but it’s more real, and I feel like it’s more of a comment on how much more work we have to do in terms of accepting everyone.

In terms of the shared timeline, this one takes us a couple of hours past the point where the first book ends and for the first time we get an idea of what all the ordinary people helping with the efforts are feeling after the battle begins. It feels fitting that this comes in Celestine’s book, from the sister who reads the crowd and sways it. I’m still holding out hope that once we’ve seen this series of events unfold from all seven sisters’ perspectives we’ll finally find out how the war plays out!

As usual I would like to comment on reading order. Since this is a series of companion novels, technically they can be read in any order. They all over the same timeframe, all mention the same key plot events, and all end on the same cliffhanger. With that said, book one does a lot more world-building legwork than the rest do and should probably be read first for ease of comprehension with the rest. I also think it might be harder for some readers to truly empathize with Coral in book two and hate her husband on her behalf if you read book three first, as the same man is presented as respectable and heroic from a colleague’s perspective in that one. Other than that, they truly can be read in any order.

Thanks again for the opportunity to continue reading this series for free in exchange for the review I’m only too happy to write! I’m eagerly looking forward to reviewing book six and I hope I’ve swayed a few more people to join the fan base for this series.

About the Author

Sherrie Cronin is the author of a collection of six speculative fiction novels known as 46. Ascending and is now in the process of publishing a historical fantasy series called The War Stories of the Seven Troublesome Sisters. A quick look at the synopses of her books makes it obvious she is fascinated by people achieving the astonishing by developing abilities they barely knew they had.

She’s made a lot of stops along the way to writing these novels. She’s lived in seven cities, visited forty-six countries, and worked as a waitress, technical writer, and geophysicist. Now she answers a hot-line. Along the way, she’s lost several cats but acquired a husband who still loves her and three kids who’ve grown up just fine, both despite how odd she is.

All her life she has wanted to either tell these kinds of stories or be Chief Science Officer on the Starship Enterprise. She now lives and writes in the mountains of Western North Carolina, where she admits to occasionally checking her phone for a message from Captain Picard, just in case.

Author Blog | Series Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Amazon

Giveaway Alert!

S. R. Cronin will be awarding a $25 Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift card to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

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