Often, novels focus on the evolution of characters from total nobodies into well-respected and lauded magicians. They shed their peasant heritage and earn a place among the elite.
With Red Sister, Mark Lawrence refuses that trope. Like many characters, Nona has had a tough life. She’s been passed around slave-owners, been beaten, and cast out. But rather than turning it around, she channels it. Adopted into the Sweet Mercy Covenant, she is taught not to do good, but instead to kill.
You would expect this to breed distrust and violence between students, and it does, for a time. But Lawrence shows his hand as a master storyteller, weaving rivalries into friendships and characters into complex beings.
Nona is the shining example of this, fiery yet unsure, a killer, yet intensely loyal. When her past begins to catch up, those friends come into play, and they do so with substance. Lawrence doesn't just throw in the stereotypes used by some writers; he imagines each one as complexly as the protagonist, and this gives the world an uncanny real-ness.
Telling an uphill battle to assassin-hood against the rich and powerful, Red Sister conveys a story few will want to miss.
Books in Book Of The Ancestor Series (1)
