Charlotte Kersten

Summary

Karys Eska is a deathspeaker, locked into an irrevocable compact with Sabaster, a terrifying eldritch entity—three-faced, hundred-winged, unforgiving—who has granted her the ability to communicate with the newly departed. She pays the rent by using her abilities to investigate suspicious deaths around the troubled city she calls home. When a job goes sideways and connects her to a dying stranger with dangerous secrets, her entire world is upended.

Ferain is willing to pay a ludicrous sum of money for her help. To save him, Karys inadvertently binds him to her shadow, an act that may doom them both. If they want to survive, they will need to learn to trust one another. Together, they journey to the heart of a faded empire, all the while haunted by arcane horrors and the unquiet ghosts of their pasts.

And all too soon, Karys knows her debts will come due.

Review

I spent a lot of my time with this book thinking about how it was written (as in how Hall constructed it) because I really, really admired that aspect of it. Above all there was just so much restraint and delicacy in how the world-building was doled out bit by bit in really organic ways, keeping the reader engaged and curious but never frustrated, overwhelmed, or overly confused.

Not only do I admire how skillfully Hall conveyed her world-building – the world itself is also incredibly fucking cool, with its pantheons of horrifying gods, the brilliant variations of day-to-day magic, and the tangle of politics that our characters are entrenched in. Hall also has an incredible skill for imagery and atmosphere, and it has been a long time since I’ve been this struck by the sense of truly being *in* a fantasy world. There is such a distinct, felt sense of the whole world being old and lived-in, and each specific location the characters travel to also feels incredibly vivid and distinct, from salt-encrusted Psikamit to lush, vibrant Eludia and sad, decrepit Miresse. There are so many striking descriptions and details that range from whimsical to beautiful to barren and grotesque. I do think the comparison to Ghibli is apt, but personally, Asunder most strongly reminded me of Disco Elysium – alive and crumbling and melancholy and vibrant and miserable and bizarre all at once.
I will say that in a book this long the descriptions did start to feel repetitive by the end; we ended up hearing a lot about the clouds and the quality of light in the sky in ways that weren’t quite different enough to stay interesting.

The relationship between Karys and Ferain has a fantastic premise- they are unwillingly bound together in a way that creates forced intimacy and cannot be separated without insane sacrifice – and I should have been gnawing at the bars of my enclosure about it, as they say on Tumblr dot com. But unfortunately something about it just didn’t quite work for me the way my favorite romances do. Karys is a very abrasive, guarded, reactive character; you completely understand why she became that way and that she is trying her best to cope with an incredibly overwhelming situation. HOWEVER, that does not automatically translate to the romance with Ferain feeling earned or really making any sense. I think this feels especially true because so many of their interactions involve Karys lashing out without much change happening in the dynamic, and also because Ferian himself is characterized as being so different from her – charismatic, witty, vibrant, emotionally intelligent etc. Besides the fact that their situation takes forced proximity to a new level, it’s hard to see exactly where the romance comes from, and that’s a shame, especially because the power of the ending relies on the romance so much.

The relationships with other characters similarly feature a lot of abrasiveness and arguing, and while it all feels emotionally grounded in who the characters were and what their individual struggles are, it did also get tiring as it happened over and over again over the course of the book. I’d also mention that for a character who is described as having to be extremely savvy and street-wise, Karys feels forced by the plot to repeatedly make very bad decisions and fail to predict betrayals from glaringly untrustworthy characters.

Most of the plot is the characters’ episodic journey from place to place as they gain information and grow closer to their goal destination. While each episode was engaging in its own way, I still feel like each piece did not quite contribute to the book’s finale as I hoped it would, especially because of spoiler-y reasons related to the final sections of the book. Tldr: incredible atmosphere, imagery and world-building, but the characters and relationships didn’t quite fall into for me. The ending is absolutely wild, though, and I really need to know what happens next!