What do you get when you take a princess-turned-nun, a witch, a knight, and a fairy godmother?
One heck of a ride.
This book by T. Kingfisher starts off with the main character, Marra, creating a dog out of bones and bringing it to life.
Then it backtracks to her childhood as a princess in a small kingdom. She has two older sisters, but she’s closer to the older one than the middle sister.
So she’s in denial when her oldest sister turns up dead.
She had been married off to the prince of a much larger, much wealthier nearby country.
It’s not stated until later in the book that her husband killed her, but even early on it’s pretty strongly suggested.
So Daughter #2 is sent off to marry him, and even though Marra has never been close to her, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t love her. She’s still her sister and she certainly doesn’t want her to be married to an abusive prince with the power to literally get away with murder.
When her second sister is married off, the contract states that, as a condition of marriage, Marra must move to a convent and take orders as a nun. If she were to have children, their claim to the throne would challenge the claim her nieces and nephews would have, and her brother-in-law can’t have that, so her parents ship her off to a convent.
She’s not excited about it, but she doesn’t seem upset at the news either. She probably figures it’s safer to live in a convent than to get married off to another abusive husband.
She spends about 15 years in the convent before deciding to take matters into her own hands regarding the fate of her sister.
As a nun, one of her duties is helping local women give birth, so she’s seen the toll it takes on their bodies.
Her sister gets pregnant as often as she can because her husband is less likely to beat her when she’s pregnant.
Marra knows that’s not sustainable, so she decides to kill her brother-in-law.
How do you go about killing a powerful prince? Especially when you’ve never so much as slaughtered an animal, much less killed a human?
The first step is to get someone on your side who’s familiar with death and knows a little magic. That means the Dust Wife, so Marra sneaks out of the convent and off to see her local Dust Wife, who gives her 3 tasks to prove herself: make a cloak out of nettles, bring a bone dog back to life, and give the Dust Wife the moon in a jar.
Marra completes the first two tasks when the Dust Wife interrupts her in exasperation. She said she had given Marra the impossible tasks so she would give up and go away. Realizing that wasn’t going to happen, she basically does the third task for her and then grudgingly agrees to take off with Marra on her quest.
She appears to have no qualms about leaving her chickens unattended, although she takes one with her because she says it has a demon in it, so she really can’t leave that one unattended.
The Dust Wife is grumpy and sarcastic. A proper curmudgeon and I loved every scene she was in.
Along the way they pick up a knight who has been exiled from his homeland for killing the wrong guy. I mean, the guy totally deserved it, but his family is still honor-bound to take revenge by killing the knight if they ever see him again.
So he joins their team, and doesn’t seem to have any qualms about killing a prince, even though it’s almost certainly a suicide mission.
Nevertheless, they’re going to need some more magic on their side. Marra conveniently remembers that she has a fairy godmother. Maybe she can help.
So they search her out, but it turns out her powers are limited.
She joins them anyway and ends up becoming useful after all.
SPOILER ALERT
OK, so, first, yes, they successfully kill the prince.
I won’t get into some side quests they had to complete to do it, but they did it.
My qualm with the end of the book is that no one has to make any real sacrifices to complete the quest. No one dies (except the evil prince and his fairy godmother.) Bone Dog is taken out by the guards, but Marra is able to resurrect him.
My other qualm with this book was that it felt a lot like a YA book – and Marra felt a lot like a YA heroine – even though she’s not.
She’s about 30 when all this is going down, but she seems pretty naive for a 30-year-old woman.
And it’s not like we can claim she was sheltered by convent life. She lost her virginity, she helped with births and deaths, she’s still very much interacting with the world as a nun.
So why doesn’t she sound like it?
A romance brews between her and the knight, who is described as being in his forties. That felt really icky to me because I kept thinking of Marra as a teenager. I had to keep reminding myself she was a lot closer to his age than she sounded.