Charlotte Kersten

“There are worse ways to die than trying.”

Year published: 2015

Category: YA dystopian/fantasy

Summary: Wasp’s job is simple. Hunt ghosts. And every year she has to fight to remain Archivist. Desperate and alone, she strikes a bargain with the ghost of a supersoldier. She will go with him on his underworld hunt for the long-lost ghost of his partner and in exchange she will find out more about his pre-apocalyptic world than any Archivist before her. And there is much to know. After all, Archivists are marked from birth to do the holy work of a goddess. They’re chosen. They’re special. Or so they’ve been told for four hundred years.

Archivist Wasp fears she is not the chosen one, that she won’t survive the trip to the underworld, that the brutal life she has escaped might be better than where she is going. There is only one way to find out.

My thoughts: this is a deeply weird little book and a really, really beautiful one. By far the best part is the story that unravels about the soldier ghost who Isobel (Wasp) meets and escapes with, agreeing to help him find another ghost in the realm of death. It turns out that he and the ghost he is searching for, named Kit, were bred to be supersoldiers in a far distant past. Kit ended up rebelling to save innocent people, getting caught and tortured and killed, and the soldier has spent his death slowly losing his memories but clinging to what he can in order to find her and try to make things right after betraying her final wishes.

They went through hell together in their training and missions, divested of all their humanity in the eyes of everyone around them and treated with none. They trusted only each other and relied on that trust to survive time and time again. When Kit chose to rebel and then sacrifice herself, the solider betrayed her wishes and ended up wanting her to live; in the end, she died anyway. The soldier’s regret and longing through his stoicism are beautifully written, as is the way he has been clinging to his faded memories and searching for so long; as is the strength of the relationship between him and Kit, as is Kit’s bravery and resilience. Perhaps most beautiful of all is their final reunion. I was sobbing at the time, and I’m tearing up while writing this now.

Isobel’s story is also incredibly strong. She is a fiercely determined girl who has clawed her way through a terrible life, and it’s great to see her start to experience things that she’d never experienced before – having her plans work, having someone to fight with her, trying to make things better and doing and doing something meaningful instead of just surviving. I also love that all the ghosts she had helped in the past come back to help her, and I love the way that the upstarts join together after death (and then, finally, in life!).

While I love everything to do with ghosts, memories afterlifes and the residual remnants of long-past lives, the magic in this book is bewildering and feels improvisational,for lack of a better word. This is definitely deliberate but still can still be frustrating and disorienting. Also frustrating is the fact that there is so much fighting and deception between Isobel and the soldier – they have both learned to fight to survive and don’t know how to trust and are desperate during the course of the story, so this makes sense as well. Ultimately, while everything I’ve mentioned is justifiable and purposeful, it can still be detrimental to the overall experience of reading. The ending is pretty much 100% pitch perfect, and I’ll be honest that I don’t quite know how I feel about there being a sequel (and a third book being published on Kornher-Stace’s Patreon). I’m definitely going to read on to find out.