Rating: WORTHY!
I hate Robin LaFevers. Let me explain how this circumstance came to be…. I started reading The Rithmatist but my son wrestled that away from me (yeah, he kicked my butt; I am so abused…) so I had to resort to the next on my list until I could scheme and plot to snatch it back from that evil brute of a son when he least expects it. The next on the list would have been LaFevers's Dark Triumph, but that's number 2 in the "His Fair Assassin" inevitable trilogy. Fortunately, in a rare instance of Extreme Organization™ (a highly dangerous sport. I advise you not to practice it) I had Grave Mercy on order at the library and they, Masters and Mistresses of Literature that they are, came through for me. Of course, having been thrashed to within a hinge of my life (hey, I was at death's door), and in a state of tremens-dous delirium and self-doubt from practicing extreme sports, I was a pushover for LaFevers to take cruel advantage of my thoroughly helpless state. It’s all her fault.
Ismae Rienne is fifteen years old, and has a deep red stain across her back from her left shoulder to her right hip: a trail of ugly welts and scars left by the herb witch's potion which failed to abort her. Fourteen or so years later, her father sold her for three silver coins to Guillo the pig farmer who abused her on their "wedding night", but never consummated the marriage once he saw this scar. Locked in a root cellar as evil incarnate, she was rescued by the same hedge priest who married her. He arranged for her to be transported across Brittany (France) to the coast. Considered to be a child sired by death, Ismae is taken to an island where she will be subject to the oversight of the abbess of Saint Mortain, the patron saint of death.
The abbey proves to be a denizen of genderist wenches whose entire waking day seems to center around plotting the demise of all mankind. That's sad, because I was on board with this until I read that part! More on this anon. After being extensively trained in pretty much everything for three years, Ismae is sent upon her first assassination, and she succeeds with admirable efficiency. Disturbing huh? What LaFevers did here is to stealth-creep her prologue right into chapter one and make me read it! Pretty savvy of her to discover how to undermine my allergy to prologues. The problem is that this is sold as a YA novel and yet here she is on the cusp of adulthood already! Sneaky, huh?
Next we meet the trope du jour, who is named Gavriel Duval, of course, and inescapably, Ismae totally like hates him to the max. Yet every time he touches her she feels the penetrating heat of his hands. He has the most amazingly super-heated hands like ever! Plus, Ismae and Gavriel are inescapably thrown together because her trustily faithful horse dies and she has to ride with him. Two of them. Together. In. The. Same. Saddle.
Despite some issues, I was enjoying this until he showed up, and even his showing up wouldn't have been anywhere near so bad if this woman who had reached the age of eighteen (give or take) solely through feeding off of her extreme hatred of humankind hadn't fallen for him like a moose through mousse. Now she has to travel with him to the court of Anne, Duchess of the Duchy of Brittany, and spy. In the words of Pink:
Ever wonder 'bout what he's doing; how it all turned to lies?
The only way to be really certain is to go out there and spy
Where there is deceit there is gonna be a spy
Where there is a spy there is gonna be a counter
Where there is a counter you know someone's gonna buy,
You've gotta go hide and spy, spy, spy
Gotta go hide and spy, spy, spy
You gotta go hide and spy, spy, spy...
LaFevers is obsessed with long moments. I did a search in Google Books and she uses the phrase 'long moment' 37 times in 549 pages, so there's a long moment every fourteen pages or so. No wonder the book takes so long to read! LaFevers has as many as three of them in one chapter - and the chapters aren’t that long! Seriously? If it’s a 'moment' it is, by definition, short. Can writers not think of a better way to express themselves than this clunker? This is a serious writing failure, and it’s not the only one LaFevers exhibits unfortunately. Having said that, I have to confess that I finished this book and that I am looking forward to its sequel, hopefully not its equal.
This abysmal trope instalust which Rienne is sickening. Since rien, as in de rien in French, means 'nothing', then is Ismae Rienne a female nothing? Just a thought! Actually Rienne is the French word for Ecuador. At one point Duval wakes Ismae from a bad dream and she almost sticks a knife in his throat. As she is cleaning up the blood from his scratch, her wrist rests on his chest and when she removes it, it throbs. Excuse me, but no, no! No! And, er, NO! And what's up with Duval - he can’t clean his scratch himself? This man who is suspicious of her, and distrusts her and resents her, puts all of that on the back burner and lets her tend his minuscule wound? Why is it that in these stories it’s always the guy with his friggin' shirt off and the woman slavishly ministering his insignificant little scrapes and aches? Please let's stop this!
LaFevers is obsessed with Duval's body heat. I did a search in Google Books and she uses the word 'heat' only 15 times, which I confess surprised me, because it seems like it's employed with much greater frequency, especially since she uses the word 'body' over fifty times! It's not even as many times as she says 'mayhap' which really stuck out like a sore point because it's such an anachronism compared with the rest of her writing. Having suffered through endless mayhaps in Kushiel's Dart, I definitely wasn't ready to be assailed by it yet again in Grave Mercy!
Given that one of the major disagreements between Breton and France is that France is under the stranglehold of Catholicism whereas Breton is in the sway of the pagan gods (according to the gospel by LaFevers), it makes no sense whatsoever for the Duchess to chide Ismae for referring to Mortain as a god rather than a saint! This is another example of LaFevers's thoughtless writing - or her confusion about the world she has created.
Shortly after the Duc de Nemours - the Duchess's betrothed - is assassinated, Ismae visits his room on impulse and kills two men who are in there, one of whom had Mortain's "marque" (how pretentious! Why not simply 'mark'? I don’t see the point of this unless it was a ham-fisted effort to get Ismae injured so that she and Duval can be intimate, but this whole episode smacks of poor writing. When Duval learns what has happened, he sends a page to find his friend (referred to as "The Beast"). His intention is to have The Beast clean up Nemours rooms, and hide the bodies, but The Beast never meets with Duval until after the pointless intimate moment is taken care of, yet The Beast reports that the rooms are cleaned. How did he know what to do since Duval never told him? Bad, bad writing! Go stand in the corner, LaFevers.
So as I mentioned, I have finished this and I recommend it if you can stomach the sometimes really bad writing and the instadore. But on the good side, the ending is really, really good, and well-written, and I liked that very much. Even the instadore is competently muted. In the end Ismae transcends her lot in life and moves on to something with a much broader sweep, and I approved of this immensely. So I cautiously recommend this with the above-mentioned caveats, and as I said, I will review volume two in this series next, and I can do this with some real hope because it's evidently about a different Ninja Nun than the first volume was.
