I read this for mod book club over on r/fantasy, and somehow despite having taken the most notes ever, I never got round to reviewing it. Well, here goes,  4 months later, but with notes.

What if you knew how and when you will die?

Csorwe does — she will climb the mountain, enter the Shrine of the Unspoken, and gain the most honored title: sacrifice.

But on the day of her foretold death, a powerful mage offers her a new fate. Leave with him, and live. Turn away from her destiny and her god to become a thief, a spy, an assassin—the wizard’s loyal sword. Topple an empire, and help him reclaim his seat of power.

But Csorwe will soon learn – gods remember, and if you live long enough, all debts come due.

One of my favorite things about this book was how weird the structure was. It started off and I thought oh this is going to be a book about X, then next chapter, well, clearly not, it’ll be about Y, a few more chapters, oh, I know, it’s about – fooled me again. The structure was really unusual and fun how it kept me guessing. I’m usually a huge grump about confusion in books, but I enjoyed it here. I also caught something pretty big early on so I could go reading feeling pretty smug, until the book club discussion where it turned out others had caught it too.

I nicknamed this The Ten Thousand Doors of Gideon the Ninth, because it does have elements of those two books together. There’s a lot of portalling in and out of worlds, in a bit of a weird science-fantasy way, and the sweet lesbians & necromancers that I wanted from Gideon. Though the main character is not directly a necromancer there’s plenty to go around.

The worldbuilding is a bit shallow, but a lot of fun, there’s a lot going on with different words, different gods, extinct races, zombies, secrets hidden all over the place. It’s a really quick read, and I think for it to work it relies a bit on the reading going along and feeling in some blanks. I devoured the book over one weekend so had no problems there, but some people in bookclubs mentioned how it kinda skips ahead now and then, and I kinda see it. I really dug the aesthetics, and found the dead satisfyingly creepy. One criticism I’ve seen is that although there appear to be elves and orcs they’re not much different from humans with pointy ears/teeth, but that wasn’t something that bothered me.

I also super worried by the names list and the pronunciation guide at the beginning, had some Gideon and Goblin Emperor flashbacks, but the names were really easy to follow and distinct, after I stopped trying to pronounce Csorwe like doorway. And I giggled when Csorwe also had trouble pronouncing Taalanthathoe.

I thought there was something really interesting about the main character. She starts off almost like an empty vessel, with no self-preservation instincts and not even thinking of herself as a person, her sole purpose is to die. Very slowly she starts thinking for herself and making her own choices, becoming fully self-aware comes very late for her. She’s also weirdly relatable:

“Csorwe had spent a lifetime readying herself to die, not to talk to strangers”

The romance is by no means a main focus, but I really liked how it started in small gestures and sort of reflected Csorwey’s transformation from doormat to her own person.

I underlined a fair bit in this book, but the qoutes are mostly too long or spoilery to type out, this made me giggle though:

“He sounded as though the Chasosa family as a whole had been bored for the last hundred years”

Another thing I really enjoyed about this book was what a quick read it was. It seemed like a hefty hardback when I got it and was worried about making the book club deadline, but I ended up reading it all in two days. It was just a lot of fun and well-paced.

Goodreads

r/fantasy Bingo:  Published in 2020 (HM), Necromancer, Book Club