He said that your violent reaction to violence was the core of your necromancy—that one day your body would revolt so magnificently against death that you would raise the very dead themselves... [loc. 308]
Miscellaneous Stones -- known as Lanie -- is in her teens when both her parents (Natty, the Chief Executioner, and Aba, the Royal Assassin) die. Her skills as necromancer are not yet mature enough to bring them back for more than a few moments, and when an unexpected creditor shows up demanding the family house and all its contents -- including the undead housekeeper Goody Graves, and the Sarcophagus of Souls which is locked by a padlock containing the ghost of Lanie's Grandpa Rad -- Lanie is forced to write to her elder sister Nita (short for Amanita) and ask her to come back from school.
Nita is gorgeous, fearsome and cruel, and Lanie (who's literally allergic to violence, and will suffer sympathetic pain if exposed to other people's physical damage) is, with good reason, afraid of her. And now Nita's brought back a lover: a falcon shapechanger, Mak, who she effectively stole from his bonded handler.
This is a long novel. A great deal happens in it, and a vast and complex world is revealed. There is necromancy (I loved Lanie's adoring group of reanimated mouse skeletons); concealed identity; footnotes; polyamory, genderqueerness, romance, found family and cross-dressing; a society where women are often in positions of relative power; a pantheon of twelve gods who all seem to be female, though not necessarily humanoid; a language which is rendered on-page as iambic pentameter; magical tides and solstitial celebrations; and some graphic violence, which viewpoint character Lanie mercifully shies from. I enjoyed it massively, as befits a book with so much to it. The dark humour and the emotional rollercoaster delighted me, and the author's joy in language made me joyful too.
[Saint Death's] cloak’s infinite but invisible train spilled down the sides of the tower in a cascade of interlocking bone and shell and chiton, in a hundred million fossilized leaves from trees that the planet Athe knew only in its youngest days, in chains of long-extinct insects trapped in amber, in festoons of fangs that once had studded the jaws of leviathans, in a lacework of the claws of dragons—or things out of which dragons were dreamed; in the beads of embryos that had died when they were yet too tiny to be detected by the naked eye. [loc. 8495]
Cooney's prose is alight with unexpected metaphors and obscure words (labefaction, hamartia, guisarmes) and the rhythms of her sentences are hypnotic: I'd love to hear her read aloud.
This is, apparently, the first in a trilogy: a fact I only discovered after finishing the novel, so I can confirm that it's a complete story in itself, without a cliffhanger ending or a sense of something lacking. I am very much looking forward to rereading Saint Death's Daughter in advance of the second volume.
My first challenge to myself, for the first draft, was to try to write a fantasy novel where the protagonist could not, absolutely could not, solve problems by a.) punching people in the face, b.) skewering people with a sword, c.) shooting them, burning them, pwning them, or otherwise eviscerating them. If I took away all violent choices--OUT OF A FANTASY NOVEL!!!--what's left? [source: Cooney's AMA on Reddit]
Fulfils the ‘more than 40 chapters’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.
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