#harper voyager

‘THEY CAME AGAINST HER AS A CHILD. NOW THEY FACE THE WARRIOR.

The ice is advancing, the Corridor narrowing, and the empire is under siege from the Scithrowl in the east and the Durns in the west. Everywhere, the emperor’s armies are in retreat.

Nona faces the final challenges that must be overcome if she is to become a full sister in the order of her choice. But it seems unlikely that Nona and her friends will have time to earn a nun’s habit before war is on their doorstep.

Even a warrior like Nona cannot hope to turn the tide of war.’

The shiphearts offer strength that she might use to protect those she loves, but it’s a power that corrupts. A final battle is coming in which she will be torn between friends, unable to save them all. A battle in which her own demons will try to unmake her.

A battle in which hearts will be broken, lovers lost, thrones burned.’

Many thanks to Harper Voyager for a copy of Holy Sister in return for an honest review.

I first read ‘Red Sister’, the first instalment in the ‘Book of Ancestor’ trilogy, in 2017. I immediately fell in love with the tumultuous adventures of our protagonist, Nona Grey, who manages to find herself with mortal enemies before she exits single figures. A worker of dark magic and adopted by a monastery of fighting nuns, Nona’s story is spread across a trilogy and ‘Holy Sister’ is the final work that brings all the threads of her story to a stunning conclusion.

By the start of ‘Holy Sister’ we have followed Nona through her childhood and teenage years, through her education in fighting and magic and her journeys along the length and breadth of the Corridor. Nona is a strong and impassioned young woman who has developed a sense of person and her own brand of right and wrong. Surrounded by fierce and complicated characters, such as her fellow magic worker and former nemesis Ara and the shadow touched Sister Kettle, Nona has reached the prime of her power and the understanding of just how much the world has to fear from the plots spawning on all sides. Lawrence manages to bring the complex storylines to a conclusion that is eminently satisfying.

Through the course of these books I’ve laughed and cried in equal measures. The relationships between characters are complicated and fraught in all the best ways. I won’t spoil the final relationship status of Nona at the end but it’s beautifully resolved and, honestly, made me well up with happiness. It’s a conclusion that makes beautiful sense considering how well it had been seeded through the rest of the trilogy.

The ending of this book will make you feel something. There is overwhelming loss and terror. No character is safe in a realistically destructive battle that will make you feel sick to the base of your stomach in fair measure. I’ve always loved how these books meld both science fiction and fantasy and the ending of this book brings those threads together wonderfully. It’s a dark, bleak and emotive conclusion to a series that I will read over and over again.

If you enjoy dark fantasy with complicated heroines, interesting world building and stunning writing then I deeply suggest you pick up the ‘Book of the Ancestor’ trilogy. I’ll be interested to see whether Lawrence writes further novels in this world and, if he does, I will be picking them up in a breath.

5 stars

“I was born for killing – the gods made me to ruin”

At the Convent of Sweet Mercy young girls are raised to be killers. In a few the old bloods show, gifting talents rarely seen since the tribes beached their ships on Abeth. Sweet Mercy hones its novices’ skills to deadly effect: it takes ten years to educate a Red Sister in the ways of blade and fist.

But even the mistresses of sword and shadow don’t truly understand what they have purchased when Nona Grey is brought to their halls as a bloodstained child of eight, falsely accused of murder: guilty of worse.”

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading this book. I wasn’t a fan of Lawrence’s ‘Broken Empire’ series, I couldn’t get into the mindset of the protagonist at all. I wasn’t even going to pick up this book initially, but reviews from friends lavished it in praise and I put in a review request, and then, assuming said request had been rejected, bought a copy. A copy arrived in my inbox just as another dropped on my doorstep and, I thought, well, this book and I were just meant to be together.

This book starts with an epilogue of sorts, but I won’t say too much about it, because to do so would be to ruin other parts of the story. The first entree into Nona’s story proper isn’t even through her own eyes, it’s through the eyes of a friend who’s viewing what little is left of their dwindling life from the wooden boards below a noose. Needless to say, the book opens with Nona having been sentenced to death for a crime unknown, and escaping the noose only through the good graces of the Abbess of the Convent of Sweet Mercy.

What follows after is my favourite sort of book. I am a complete sap for schools of magic and violence, all of my favourite books have some kind of place of learning in them. The beauty of this book is that it manages to stay ‘external’ whilst focusing inwards. We learn the stories of Nona’s early life and the history and politics of the world around her. It’s all told in great detail but I never once felt as if the information was simply being dumped upon me.

One thing I have always appreciated about Lawrence’s books is the genre that they lie in. A sort of post-apocalyptic fantasy. In Nona’s world, they are living on a planet watched over by a dying sun, where the feeble light grants them only a narrow corridor of living space between the ice. Moreso, they people of Abeth are not even from that world, having arrived on the planet many hundreds of years ago aboard great ships. I love the interplay between the fantasy and science fiction aspects of the book, how the magic seems to be amplified by the ‘shiphearts’ or reactor cores of the ancient space ships.

Nona, herself, is a wonderful character. She’s courageous and frightened, naive and world weary, stubborn and tentative. Basically, in all aspects, she is a young girl coming of age, a young girl thrust into a dark and unpleasant world and forced to come to terms with it. One of my favourite books when I was growing up was ‘Lirael’ by Garth Nix for many of the same reasons that I’ve come to love this book. We have a curious and introverted protagonist carving herself a niche in an environment that is both fascinating and dangerous. A young girl who has managed to utterly unbalance the world around her just by her existence. The way that Nona is written, and her feuds and friendships with those around her, is just amazing. I had flu for the last couple of days and just being able to curl up with this book was perfect escapism.

This is book filled with shadow, poison and politics. It’s a slow, rich, dark odyssey that, even after almost 500 pages, I felt sad to finish. ‘Grey Sister’, the second book, is due to be published next spring and, honestly, I can see myself reading this a good few times between.

So if you like complicated and truthful heroines, blood and bladework with a hefty dose of darkness then this is definitely a book you should have on your radar and your ‘to be read’ list.

Many many thanks to Harper Voyager ( @harpervoyagerbooks) for a copy in return for an honest review. What a book!

Review originally posted at Moon Magister Reviews.