Dark Triumph by Robin LaFevers

Rating: WORTHY!

Dark Triumph is the second in the "His Fair Assassin" series (I reviewed the first, Grave Mercy here) and it takes off right where the first in this series ends, but it does so from the perspective of another of the assassin nuns: Sybella. In volume one, Sybella was one of the colleagues of Ismae, the main character and narrator of that volume. Sybella appeared very briefly, but on several occasions, yet she was never really graced with an introduction. Now she has her own story, and it ain't a happy one! She's resident in the castle of Count D'Albret, and living in fear of discovery. She has only one ally, Julian, and he's hardly her friend - not unless he can get something out of her in return for his "friendship". Indeed, Sybella's intimate history is rather florid, it would seem, and Julian has played an intimate part in it, although LaFevers appears too terrified of scandal to delve into it in any form other than hints and allusions.

In this novel, Sybella is pretty much under house arrest in D'Albret's purloined palace, and is watched closely. She is nominally the Count's daughter, but believes herself, like Ismae, to be actually a daughter of Mortain, the god of death. In passing, it's interesting to note that Mortain is actually the name of a city in Normandy, situated very close to the border with the region of Brittany.

Why Mortain chooses to rape women and have daughters who become assassins is left unexplained, but if there is one consistency in the history of humankind's invention of gods it is that these gods are useless, and require human intervention on a routine basis to help them out. They're also well-known for raping women, including the current popular god, Yahweh, the god of the world's three foremost monotheistic religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. According to the Christians, that god raped Miriam to produce a son for slaughter. But Mortain seems to be particularly incompetent in that all he can do is mark people for death! He cannot kill them himself, but requires one of his female slaves to, er, undertake this? How ridiculous is that? What a pathetic and ineffectual god he is!

This novel starts out as though it were a fan fiction based on Graceling, the accomplished assassin traversing the castle steps. I had two immediate problems with it. The first is that this is another first person PoV tale. I have issues with that kind of story to begin with, but take a moment to think about it in this context: the narrator is a secret assassin, yet she's writing a true story about what she does, including names, places and dates?! Not a wise choice for a writer to make! OTOH, we do get (finally) a confirmation of someone's age in this novel: it's the Duchess (although she's crowned queen before we learn this) and she's thirteen. Some reviewers had assumed she was twelve from a sentence in the previous volume, but the sentence was so ambiguously worded that it was impossible to honestly assert with complete conviction any age IMO. This was another of Lafevers's writing failures.

The second problem I have with this is the blatant genderism - strike that, not genderism, as much as pure hatred of men! This new narrator says (on line six of chapter one!) in the context of learning how to kill "...laying out all the vulnerable points on a man's body...". For a moment (or a long moment as LaFevers would have it!), let us re-write the line: "...laying out all the vulnerable points on a woman's body...". Indeed, let us re-write the entire novel but reverse the gender roles. Would you be outraged at it then? I would. So why no outrage when that same line and that same tone in that same novel is written about men? We already learned from volume one in this series that women can be just as evil as men, so why this sustained campaign against men? It's a bit creepy to say the least.

Yes, back then (the first chapter is dated 1489AD) men typically did hold the reins/reigns (and unfortunately still do at a disproportionate percentage), but evil is not solely the preserve of men, and even where the evil is perpetrated by a man, there is often a woman who supports him, yet nowhere in either volume of this series so far, do we see any amelioration of this vendetta which is specifically and consistently directed towards men. As another reviewer pointed out, these femme vraiment fatale (or ninja nuns!) attack men, but they also work for a male god! Not very much in the way of logic there.

I was amused when, at one point, Sybella remarks upon Ismae's sharp wit, but I just got through reading that first volume and I recall none of that! Perhaps she's talking about the three years when they were in training, not a whit of which was shared with us in that first volume. That particular history is something which, done right, would have been really worth the telling, but it was not to be. More like 4F, in fact.

And now a word about the incessant use of 'demoiselle'! It's rife in these two novels! It's fine as far as it goes, but it really stands out because of its extreme frequency, rather like 'mayhap' and one or two other words did in volume one. If you go to dictionary.com and use the French - English translator there, the definition of this word is: unmarried lady; young lady; damsel; rammer, object or tool that rams! Hmm! The funny thing is if you split it into "de moi selle", it means "to me saddle". Hmm squared! Obviously this is just another thing to be cautious about when you're writing a novel!

So Sybella really, and I mean really, wants to murder this Count, but it seems she is to be robbed of the pleasure. Her instructions from the Abbey are instead, to free The Beast - the prisoner who was taken at the end of the last novel. This she does and this leads to arguably the best piece of action/adventure writing from LaFevers's keyboard in two novels. Of course, the massive telegraphing of the oncoming affair between Sybella and the Beast undermines the purity of the adventure with its ham-fistedness. This volume is definitely a league or two ahead of Grave Mercy. At least that's how it seemed at the half-way point! Unfortunately, then we have to deal with Ismae and Duval. Again. It's a pity that their divinity, Mortain, didn't have the god-like power to tell all these hapless Bretons that they were going to lose, that Anne would be forced to marry the French king, and that she would herself die before the age of forty (assuming that LaFevers follows the actual history of the region at all). Given how thoroughly reliably gods have proven themselves to be utterly unreliable throughout history, I don't find it the least bit surprising that they were invented by frightened, ignorant, and delusional humans!

Despite what I've said about LaFevers's writing in terms of how it reads, in terms of how she puts the words on paper, I have to say I have found no glaring errors until I reached p204 where she writes: "Provided the attack come from within." which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It should probably read "Provided the attack does not come from within." Another mistake I think she made has nothing to do with writing but with story-telling. Maybe that sounds like a tautology, but what I mean by "story-telling" is how she puts together her tale, her world, her mythology, and in this instance particularly: mythology. I guess others might call that world-building, if we take world-building to be understood in its very broadest sense. LaFevers claims in her novel that gods are real and powerful and worthy of veneration - just like the religiously inclined do in real life, in fact! But the problem LaFevers has is the same one the religious have in real life: their gods lack credibility and are actually completely powerless!

Everything the Bretons do is aimed at staying free of the French, and maintaining their independence and their old gods, so why are they worshiping these gods in secret? Why are they forced to venerate them as saints instead of as gods? Who, exactly, is it who is repressing these old gods in LaFevers's Brittany? She never explains this, but if the gods are real and powerful and Brittany so weak, then why are the gods not helping?! And on another note, how is it that some people see this as a feminist novel when the Duchess is so weak that she must marry a man to save her and her province? This isn’t a feminist novel at all, it’s quite the opposite, because not only does the Duchess need a man, so too do the assassins featured in each volume.

LaFevers uses the term "High-traffic areas" which is such an anachronism that it really jumped out and reminded me, yet again, that I was reading fiction that has high traffic in the area commonly known as 'poorly written'. LaFevers also seems to suffer from chronopsia. This is a word I've coined to described those people who are unable to gage the passage of time accurately. Here's why I think this is the case with LaFevers: Sybella goes to visit The Beast when he's recovering from injuries in a local convent. When she leaves his bedside, it’s "not quite morning". She returns to the palace and sleeps "a short while" and then has to go to a council meeting. When she leaves the council meeting very shortly afterwards and goes outside, she's in the "cool night air"! Where the hell did the entire day go? It’s not morning, it’s night because she sees downtown that the bars are open and people are reveling. She slaughters two of these revelers, who happen to be D'Albret's infiltrators and who are reveling all over a poor innocent woman. But suddenly it’s almost daybreak again! My, how the gods make the sands of time run at their bidding!

Despite all this, I do still prefer this novel to its predecessor, but LaFevers seems determined not to make it easy to like it. She has this hardened assassin (Sybella) agonizing over what people will think of her now they know she is D'Albret's daughter even though she really isn’t his daughter because she's Mortain's daughter. Are you still following this? It's seriously and amateurishly confused. She frets and worries most of all over what The Beast will think of her, and I found this to be at first annoying, followed by irritating, and finally truly nauseating. It is so out of character for Sybella. But at least she gets the goods on what Mortain really wants: she learns from Ismae that the marque does not command them to kill someone. It’s merely an indication that the person bearing it is going to die soon.

But enough of this rambling banter! In conclusion, and this might surprise you, I am in fact going to rate this as worthy if only because it was significantly better than LaFevers's previous sortie into this series. There were still many problems with it, however, which is why I have really no interest in pursuing this series any further. I committed only to the first two and that was plenty! They were worth reading but not addictively so. Hopefully, should you choose to read it, you will be able to offer it a warmer reception that was I!

Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers

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.

Graceling by Kristin Cashore

Rating: WORTHY!

Let this be a lesson to authors in choosing the best title for their novel! And let this be a lesson to potential readers not to judge a book by its title! When I first saw the title Graceling I was convinced that it was quite literally a fairy story; that is, a story about fairies, and I had no interest in it at all. That's not to stake a claim that I would never read a fairy story, but I've never yet been moved in that direction by any such novel of which I've become aware.

Even when I learned that the female protagonist in this novel was an assassin, it didn't fire up any deeper interest in the novel within me because I still thought it was about fairies! It was the 'grace' combined with the 'ling' which did it, I think; it was too much of a airy-fairy title! Then I happened to be looking along the library shelves and saw Fire. I picked it up not realizing that it was in the same world as Graceling and I was intrigued by the blurb. Graceling just happened to be sitting right next to it. Thinking they were sequential I picked that one up as well. I discovered that they're not a sequential pair, but they do share the same world, so I decided that if I'm going to read Fire, I ought to read Graceling first, just in case. In for a pennyweight, in for a pounding. So here I am, a hundred and 30-some pages into this 470-some page story and I have to confess that I'm not disappointed so far.

The female protagonist is Katsa, the male protagonist probably Prince Po. Yeah, about those names! I actually love 'Katsa', but Po? No! What is it which makes cat-like names so cool for female protagonists? Kat, Kitai, Katsa? Anyway, we start with her helping to bust out a Lienid prince (with the bizarre name of Tealiff) from prison. Katsa harms no one, she merely knocks the guards out and pops a sleeping pill in their mouth to keep them out long enough for her team to get away with their prisoner.

Though Katsa is supposed to be King Randa's enforcer, she's working as an independent on this job. She's supposed to be traveling to a neighboring kingdom to beat up on a guy who took more forest acreage than he had contracted for, but before she makes that trip, she side-tracks to spring this aging foreign prince, and returns him to Randa City, her own capital, where they keep him hidden so no one will know that Middluns (Katsa's home nation) will know they had anything to do with it.

The only unexpected thing on this entire adventure was her encounter with another of her kind, whom she knocks out, but doesn't kill. It's just as well, because he later shows up at the palace where she resides, and it turns out he's another prince of Lienid. Lienid has seven princes, and the world in which these people all reside has seven kingdoms: Nander, Sunder, Estill, Wester, Middluns, Monsea, and Lienid. The first four nations in that list tend to be at war with one another for one reason or another, the latter three, not so much.

In these nations there is, on occasion, a child is born who has a 'grace' - that is a special talent at something or other. These graces can be for anything from cooking, to taking care of horses, to swimming, to being an expert at fighting and killing, and even mind reading. Katsa discovered her talent when she accidentally killed a much older cousin who was touching her way too familiarly. Those who have graces are readily recognizable by having eyes of two different colors. Katsa's are blue and green, Prince Po's are silver and gold. Such people are shunned as a general rule, but if they have a great talent for something their king deems useful, then the king can order that the bearer of the grace be brought into his service; hence Katsa's permanent presence at the palace. The King is also her uncle.

Katsa isn't happy being an enforcer. She dislikes hurting people and becomes very angry when her king demands her services, but she is the best there is, better even than Prince Po, though he is older and stronger. The two of them begin to bond over their shared grace, and fight with each other each day just for the pleasure of being able to combat someone who is actually a challenge to them. But Katsa is really painfully slow to realize that Po is not only graced as a fighter, he's also graced as a mind reader - as long as your mind is focused on him. This ability to read her intentions towards him is how he manages to stay in a fight with her, but of course it makes it rather questionable as to how Katsa was able to knock him out when she encountered him at the start of this novel!

Katsa is also friends with Randa's own son, Prince Raffin, who hangs out with a very close male friend called Bann, pursuing intellectual interests, particularly medicine. In one experiment, he ended up with his hair dyed blue, and so currently isn't in his father's best graces. He and Katsa, together with spy chief Oll and Lord Giddon, who is in love with Katsa, along with a web of people across the seven nations, are part of The Council. It was on Council business that Katsa rescued Prince Tealiff.

The apparently budding romance between Po and Katsa is being handled rather nicely, so I don't even get to complain about that(!), and there appears to be no love triangle here, but there comes a threat to the smooth unfolding of that love when Katsa is dispatched by Randa on another bullying mission. She's supposed to bully Lord Ellis into giving up one of his daughters in marriage to another lord who lives in such a besieged locale that he's having a hard time finding a wife. Randa volunteers one of Elli's daughters, but Ellis refuses. Katsa refused to beat up on him for that. Instead she gives both Giddon and Oll slight injuries and orders them to tell Randa that she refused and they were injured in foolishly trying to coerce her. In that way, she takes sole blame for her action - or lack of it.

Giddon, trying to help her out of her dilemma, proposes to her, somehow thinking that a marriage to him will reduce or deflect the King's opportunities for punishment. Katsa refuses him, but during their discussion, she is finally clued in to Po's talent, and she confronts Po angrily, calling him a traitor before storming back to her room where her maid, Helda, tries to comfort her. Then comes an unintentionally hilarious sentence:

Later, when Katsa was dressed and Helda grappled with her wet hair before the fire, there was a knock on her entrance.

Po tries to apologize to her, but she's very angry. Without having resolved her relationship with him, she's summoned to the King's presence to answer for her refusal to obey him in the Lord Ellis affair. She takes charge of her own life from this point onwards. Rather than being cowed by the King, she refuses to work for him any more and in the morning (why the delay?!) she leaves the castle with Po, and they head towards Monsea to investigate further the kidnapping of Prince Tealiff.

The Journey is long and they use it to pursue their differences, resolve their issues, and plan ahead for what they might encounter in Monsea. Katsa also grows to know herself better - and realizes that her grace is not murdering, but surviving. Her fighting skills are only a small part of this. For her own peace of mind, Katsa practices both conveying messages to Po just by thinking, and on also blocking him out of her mind. As they meander through the forest and scale the mountains into Monsea, they discuss the king. He came to power oddly. He was not of the royal blood, but showed up as an orphan and vagabond. He had only one eye and people took to him readily. Eventually the king adopted him and named his as heir to the throne, whereupon the king and queen and his top advisers all mysteriously died, leaving the one-eyed vagabond to rule.

It's Po's and Katsa's considered opinion that the reason the vagabond king is one-eyed is that he deliberately cut out the other eye to hide the fact that he has a grace: a grace which enables him to control the minds of others, which is how he got away with all that he did. I think we're about to learn a bit more of his history in a prequel called Fire, which I'll be reviewing next.

Unfortunately for Katsa and Po, all their plans come to naught because the first person they encounter upon entering the kingdom is the king himself, chasing his escaping wife Ashen (a kinswoman of Po's) and slaughtering her. Her dying thought is to Po, to find her daughter who is now alone in the forest.

For the first time in her life, Katsa realizes that there is something which she can neither fight nor defend against: the king's mind control. They run and hide in the forest, eventually finding the young princess. Po is protected against the King's power because he can sense the King's thoughts and repel them, but Katsa cannot. She has turned her weapons over to Po and vowed to do everything he asks without question as a protection against being mind-controlled, but she couldn't obey Po's order to strike the King down because the King had already overpowered her mind. Now the two of them have no plan and must urgently decide what to do next.

I love this story so much that I'm going to award it a 'worthy' even though I haven't finished it yet. I don't even care if the ending sucks! This novel is so good that it's worth reading even if the ending is awful!

Well the ending wasn't awful, it was awesome (and no, I'm not going to tell you what happens! I wouldn't dream of robbing you of that joy.) This is a really amazing novel, with great characters, very well-written, a superbly well-done YA "romance" which ought to make other YA romance writers pay attention if they know what's good for them, and learn something about how intelligent, self-respecting people really behave in relationships. And no, I'm not talking about the fighting! Go read it: grace yourself!

Graceling is followed sequentially by Bitterblue and preceded by Fire, although I understand that Cashore recommends that they be read in the order they were published, which is how I've been reading them.