
In a land where the three suns keep darkness at bay, there’s a girl with a shadow darker than it should be. After her father is executed and her mother thrown into the deepest, darkest jail cell, Mia Corvere finds herself, not quite, alone and somehow not quite as afraid as she should be. Taken in by Mercurio, she is tutored in the ways of the Red Church, an elite organisation of assassins. In order to become a Blade, and enact the revenge she so desires, she must first find the school and pass its difficult and cruel tests.
The brighter the light, the deeper the shadows…
A few people told me Nevernight was like Harry Potter with assassins, and frankly, that kind of put me off for a while. But never fear, I did give it a go and they were wrong and I loved it! Well, there’s a tiny bit that could be Harry Potter-like if you hadn’t grown up with other boarding school stories as a reference point.
The story is rich with world-building and there is so much mileage in this world. It took me a while to understand that it was switching between two versions of Mia but this soon became clear. Additional information is included in footnotes (much in the style of Discworld) but if you find these an annoying distraction you can easily skip them and not miss anything crucial to the plot or characters.
But though they were still mostly strangers, she knew one thing about every acolyte around her. Murderers, all.
Mr Kindly is a shadow creature who appears as a cat with no eyes. It is implied that the Darkin are something to be feared so I love that he has such a benevolent name. Actually, throughout the book, there is very little to suggest that Darkin are in fact evil, other than the, most probably evil, followers of the light don’t like them.
Back to this school of assassins then. I liked that so much of the books revolves around Mia’s backstory and also that it is a huge trial just finding the school. Mia must prove herself again and again, and sometimes she must prove that she is heartless. She finds little kindness in the masters, who want to hone her into one of the finest and detached killing machines. Yet sometimes compassion comes from the most unexpected places.
Mia reached out and took hold of the shadows about her. Thread by thread, she drew the darkness to her with clever fingers, like a seamstress weaving a cloak, a cloak over which unwary eyes might lose their way.
I cannot wait for the next book, it’s such a multi-layered fantasy and not as grimdark as it might seem at first. Yes, there is sex and swearing, and even the more complex language used means this is definitely not a book aimed for younger teens.
Goodreads | Amazon | Waterstones | Hive | Wordery
Book Source: Illumicrate
Related posts
1 Comment
Leave a Reply Cancel reply
Subscribe via Email
Recent Posts
Currently Reading
BookWyrm
patchworkbunny wants to read "Eight Bears" [...]
patchworkbunny started reading "Midnight" [...]
Temi's degree in neuroscience feeds into this book so much as it explores the implications, good and bad, of a chip in our brains. How it can be used for… [...]
patchworkbunny started reading "Mister Magic" [...]
rated This Delicious Death: 3 stars [...]
I'm so glad you've written this review! I have this and I was really excited about it at first and then I heard all sorts of iffy things about it (including the Harry Potter thing!) so I dropped it down the priority list. Now I can bump it back up!