** spoiler alert ** 
 This is my first review, so please be kind... 
 I started reading The Executioness with some high expectations. Which, for the most part, where met. The world was very interesting to me: every use of magic causes a bramble to grow. Enough magic gets used, and the brambles will overrun cities. This sets the stage for the main character Tana. She lives with her drunken husband, their two children, and her father. Her father is an executioner in the city on Khaim. He has fallen ill, and is dieing. Given the option for one last job, he takes it, forcing Tana to take up his axe. The brief description on the flap (and the title) made it sound like she had the job for if not a long time, some time. Tana had only one execution to perform before the raiders came and attacked. She performs her second on her own father to end his suffering before chasing after the raiders to find her children. She takes on one horse back raider and is defeated. After being given a broken ankle, she is thrown into the brambles. The thorns have a poison which will put you into a deep slumber if you are exposed to enough. Up to this point I found the book interesting, and Tana was a real character. She hated her father for the position he put her in, she looked down on her husband's drunkenness, and she had concerns for her children. She blotched her first execution; having to strike three times, she feared being found out. The drive to find her children, and her easy defeat at the hands of the raider also felt realistic to me. 
 After Tana waking in the caravan, I felt the story was rushed and skipping ahead. Tara is allowed to learn the arquebuses (I think powder rifles are the closest thing to them) and become a guard after being trained with her axe. The caravan-master knew she didn't have fighting experience, and it seems that women fighters are extremely rare in this world. I felt that she was given this out of hand for the caravan being short handed in other areas. And other than some slight pain that is never mentioned again, her broken ankle is dismissed. After a raid destroys the caravan, she joins a rebel group and amasses an 'Army of Widows' with the help of one of the survivors from the attack. It never comes out and gives an exact time frame, but a 'couple of months' in mentioned. Which is a short time to amass the group of two thousand woman and train them. 
 The battle seemed to last only a couple pages before Tana makes it to the harbor just to see the last ship carrying her children leaving over the horizon. Then BOOM! She's an old queen in a city friendly to philosophers, waiting for her children to make their way there. She still kills anyone found using magic, but other than that it is a friendly city. I wish some more time would have been spent showing her struggle to become queen, and the problems that came along with. 
 Overall, I did enjoy this book, and I would recommend it to my friends. It was a good quick read, and I will look into the other book in the pair, The Alchemist. I do wish it was longer, and that some more detail was included. Would I buy it in hardcover? No. I am glad I checked this out from the library, this isn't worth the cover price. And depending on how much the paperback price will be, I might not be willing to buy it new.