The blurb
The Academy of Kindness exists to create agents of retribution, cast in the image of the Furies – The Kindly Ones – against whom even the gods hesitate to stand.
Each year one hundred girls are sold to the Academy. Ten years later only three emerge.
The Academy’s halls run with blood. The few who survive its decade-long nightmare have been forged on the sands of the Wound Garden. They have learned ancient secrets amid the necrotic fumes of the Bone Garden. They leave its gates as avatars of vengeance, bound to uphold the oldest of laws.
Only the most desperate would sell their child to the Kindnesses. But Rue … she sold herself. And now, a lifetime later, a long and bloody lifetime later, just as she has discovered peace, war has been brought to an old woman’s doorstep.
That was a mistake.
The review
Mark Lawrence is back… and with Daughter of Crows we must acknowledge the Return of the King (of grimdark). The world that Mark has painted here is bleak – almost as dark as the ink that describes it.
Are you ready to suffer? If so, read on…
I have to say, even after decades of reading fantasy, no one quite delivers a line like Mark Lawrence. He delivers his prose with knife, always razor sharp and the cuts are deep. As soon as I opened the first page, I was pulled into this story. A story of rage – rage against the patriarchy, against brutality, but also against the ticking of time. Age itself is a foe in this story, a foe we call come to dread as much as the monsters that haunt these pages.
We have a multitude of POV characters in Daughter of Crows. Bek, Einsa, Mollandra, Molly, Rue, and the mysterious Eldest. Life is hard for the girls and women found within these pages. Life is unfair for all perhaps, but in this world, there are fates that are worse than others. Here, every year one hundred girls are collected and taken to the Academy of Kindness. An academy where those who survive deal out death and judgement. That might sound worthy, and perhaps it is. Surviving long enough to deal out this judgement is the problem, for only three of the hundred are allowed to become a Kindness and the road they tread is filled with magic, terror and death.
Some characters will relish this violence, others will run away, many will die. A few will be reborn.
Why?
Well, when revenge is required, someone needs to dish it out, and as it turns out, deciding to try and kill a Kindness is quite the mistake.
In short, Daughter of Crows is full of imagination. Woven with mythology, the word feels tangible and real and bloody. It is alsofull of heart – as amidst the darkness, friendship endures and love exists. This, perhaps, is my favourite sort of story.
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