Together as one book I have given this a 3 stars. Overall I enjoyed the first story but would have much preferred an extended version of Queen Story or a story on another character such as Shade rather than the Farley story in Steel Scars. I managed to read through this so it was not bad enough for me to force myself to read but this probably was helped by the fact it was only about 100 pages. As an individual story I would rate this with just managing to get a 3/5. To be honest I had no clue what any of them meant, with code names being used as well as real names it was hard to keep track on what they were talking about.

Also in this story there was a lot of decoded messages that were being sent between people in the Scarlet Guard, regarding the mission Farley was on. Farley came across in this rather a boring character where as in the Red Queen and Glass Sword I found her to be quite interesting. However I didn’t really have any interest in this story at all, it didn’t hook me in and I didn’t feel the need to really know this story. Steel Scars tells us more about Farley and what she was doing before and overlaps with the Red Queen story. As an individual story I would rate this a 3.5/5 as I would have liked a bit more detail in it. 'Queen Song' is an episode in the life of Queen Coriane as she records a secret diary about her heady courtship with the crown prince, the birth of a new prince, Cal, and the potentially deadly challenges that lay ahead for her. The only issue I had with this story was that it didn’t answer the question on who actually killed her, if anything it made it even more questionable. Discover the truth of Norta's bloody past in these two revealing prequels to 1 New York Times bestseller Red Queen. We have new and used copies available, in 2 editions - starting at 1.45. The character of Coriane I didn’t fall in love with as much as I would have liked to, she spent a lot of time doubting herself and complaining about being alone in the beginning. Buy Cruel Crown by Victoria Aveyard online at Alibris. I enjoyed finding out more about Queen Coriane in the Queen Song story, including how she met King Tiberias and how she died. Both of these short stories were a nice addition to the Red Queen series.