So, I’m not a Mark Lawrence diehard. I appreciated and read with great
enjoyment Prince of Thorns and Prince of Fools, and while I have every
intention to read the follow-ups, my reading list is so freaking huge
that I really don’t want to invest months of my time on a series of
books. I LIKE serialization in fantasy, nothing wrong with that at all,
but I’m not a great client for a poor author. I read one book, I like
it, and then it’s 3 years+ until I end up with the desire to face the
following novel. That said, I really can’t wait to see what happens with
Red Sister’s follow-ups, and will buy and read them as soon as they
come out.Red Sister was that good. It is - together with Sherwood Smith’s Inda, my all-time favourite fantasy world, character cast, series, and with just one book out as I write this.
It’s merciless, action-packed (without reading like an action flick in book form like Prince of Fools, which is not a problem per-se but felt strange and breathless for me), surprisingly tender and loving and yet very British at times. Yes, British as fuck. For example, this book by and large plainly supports and features the traditional “stiff upper lip affection” parenting style, which is endlessly confusing for a Slavic/Mediterranean-bred close knit family guy like me. This is how it feels, in a tight packed demo, if you are wondering: “Come here little girl! No, don’t get too close, I just need for you to let me pet your head gingerly: there. I’m fond of you, you know? In fact I’d get gladly tortured for you, and I happen to regularly feed my friends to the fire, also for you. You are allowed to watch, indeed, you are required to. I’d also gladly make you some tea, and if it will be the case, I'll cruelly avenge your death. What? No. A hug is out of the question, don’t be ridiculous. By the way, stop your lollygagging. You are supposed to be left in the wilderness to die if you are weak today, and it’s already half past eleven.”)
This book’s genre is quite plainly, fantasy. It has a young protagonist, but it is not Young Adult since, well, it’s not being marketed like it nor formatted to avoid excessive bad words and fucking, which I suppose is what makes or breaks a YA novel. That aside, Red Sister has strong sci-fi elements, and it looks like a “Dying Earth” scenario. The background world is fascinating, and looks like the action unfolds on a planet colonized by the human race in ancient times. People come in variety, and diversity is not an important factor: skin color and hair color are remarkable only as descriptors, what matters here is whether a person is rich or poor, or is a “baseline” human (never called as such), or features some hereditary augmented trait. The colonization, it seems, carried over to this sick sad planet 4 kinds of genetically altered augmented humans that crossbred dozens of generations ago and very rarely breed true anymore - and as such are pretty valuable. Some of them are fast, some of them are huge like André the Giant, some of them do stuff that is plainly like magic, and I can only surmise it is some sort of genetically encoded link to very advanced tech.
The world our main character walks is pure inadulterated frozen shit. The sun is a dying red dwarf, the equator is a temperate corridor between solid ice, kept clear with a gigantic orbital lens - called the Focus Moon - that makes the round once per day and keeps the frost at bay. Everybody lives in the Corridor, except some barbarian tribes eking their survival locked in a Fremen-like knife duel against Charles Darwin. Kids grow up chanting nursery rhymes about how the Focus Moon’s orbit is slowly decaying and it will fall down, and everybody’s ass will freeze over. Also, kids get tried and hung like in America. As I said, it’s frozen shit all over.
But Nona, oh, our main character Nona escapes the life as a dirt-scratching peasant to be trained as a ninja nun, and the book is a mix of assassin-magical school and political intrigue, that manages GRANDLY to let kids be kids, ninjas be ninjas and dark, weird sorcery to be dark and weird. Nona is an incredible protagonist: she’s scrappy, pig headed and slightly disturbed. Being a kid, she invests a lot of effort and anxiety in the ever-important question: “am I normal?”. But she is, in every way that counts: she’s a kid, she thinks stupid kid thoughts, she gets embarassed again and again in silly situations, she has a lot of problems and she grows up in front of the reader. She is also badass, and she gets to be badass only because she is put into the grinder, and of course she could beat you up even at twelve, you doughy, lazy chauvinistic neckbeard. But Nona will also crumple in a heap of broken-up insecurity when the wrong words are said at the wrong time with the wrong tone, being a rather credible little girl. The others characters are mainly weaponized nuns or weaponized little girls too, and each and every one of them is interesting, and works really well with the setting and the main character.
As for style, this Mark Lawrence is the most enjoyable I read. Gone is the first person: Nona’s world is described in third. It is a disguised third person omniscent that feels limited to the MC’s point of view. You catch a lot of stuff Nona wouldn’t be able to know about the world within the narration, and some wry commentary about the world that is not a nine year old’s, especially towards the beginning. I don’t consider it a defect, but it broke a bit of the immersion and made me scratch my head at times. Should I fish for blemishes or defects? No. It is not a novel that is supposed to be a perfect gem. It is supposed to be Nona’s story. I feel that the author style is to conjure the world to suit the needs of his inspiration, and Mark Lawrence is clever and inspired more than enough to make this need fit the plot like clockwork.
Review originally posted on Goodreads on April, 2017
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