Charlotte Kersten

So What’s It About?

To be born into a family of royal assassins pretty much guarantees that your life is going to be… rather unusual. Especially if, like Miscellaneous “Lanie” Stones, you also have a vicious allergy to all forms of violence and bloodshed, and an uncanny affinity for bringing the dead back to life.

To make matters worse, family debt looms – a debt that will have to be paid sooner rather than later if Lanie and her sister are to retain ownership of the ancestral seat, Stones Manor. Lanie finds herself courted and threatened by powerful parties who would love to use her worryingly intimate relationship with the goddess of death for their own nefarious ends. But the goddess has other plans…

What I Thought

To start out, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say how much I enjoyed the writing in this book. It is lavish and vivid, clever and quirky, and a really enjoyable way that feels wholly unique. The footnotes, descriptions, and strange details are lush and charming and macabre all at the same time, which I think describes the book as a whole very well.

There is some really unique worldbuilding here as well, and it’s incorporated in a way that makes it digestible and clear despite how much of it there is. We get to see a broad variety of interesting cultures with their own deep histories, perspectives on magic and religion, and stories. I really enjoyed the way magic works here, and learning about necromancy was a joy. In addition, the found family element is absolutely lovely, especially with the core trio of Lanie, Datu and Mak.

At the same time, a few other things didn’t totally work for me. I completely bounced off of the romance between Canon Lir and Lanie. I feel like Cooney wrote lots of lovely phrases about how Lanie felt about them, but despite all of that, their connection just never felt convincing and touching the way Lanie’s connection with characters like Goody, Datu, and Mak were. For me, at least, it didn’t help that Canon Lir speaks in a very formal and flowery way, which made some of their scenes feel a bit stilted and made their connection feel a bit less authentic to me.

The other thing I’m not quite sure about is the core “lesson” that Lanie learns over the course of the book. Lanie makes a large number of really bad decisions throughout – staying to have sex with Canon Lir instead of freeing Goody, showing up to the Bloodlighting without thinking about her allergy to violence, not realizing that Grandpa Rad could get ahold of her orblins, and not considering the danger of Datu and Undies’ bond when creating it. Several of these things have extremely negative consequences. The big turning point of the book for her is realizing that she doesn’t have to be a source of suffering and destruction because of her necromancy magic and her family legacy…but this just doesn’t really ring true to me when she has only really caused destruction and suffering because of her bad decision making/not thinking things through properly. This aspect of things is never really addressed as a character flaw or something to be considered the way her family legacy is.

That being said, I do still dig the overall message of being more than our family’s past, forming new families of choice, and being able to break cycles of harm and violence. It’s a strong message delivered via a story that is vibrant, unique, and pretty delightful (in a deeply macabre way) overall.