Saint Death’s Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney – Review

Published: April 12, 2022

Publisher: Rebellion Publishing

Series: Saint Death #1

Genre: Fantasy

Pages: 692 (ebook)

My Rating: 3.75/5.00

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis:
Life gets complicated when Death gets involved.

To be born into a family of royal assassins pretty much guarantees that your life is going to be… rather unusual. Especially if, like Miscellaneous “Lanie” Stones, you also have a vicious allergy to all forms of violence and bloodshed, and an uncanny affinity for bringing the dead back to life.

To make matters worse, family debt looms – a debt that will have to be paid sooner rather than later if Lanie and her sister are to retain ownership of the ancestral seat, Stones Manor. Lanie finds herself courted and threatened by powerful parties who would love to use her worryingly intimate relationship with the goddess of death for their own nefarious ends. But the goddess has other plans…

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This has got to be one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read, but that’s probably only because I haven’t gotten to Gideon the Ninth. And yet… once I pushed past my urge to DNF it due to impatience, I really liked it. “Why did you almost DNF this?” you may wonder. Honestly, it’s because it was kind of slow at the beginning and weird as shit so it took some time to acclimate.

Miscellaneous “Lanie” Stones writes to her darling elder sister Amanita to inform her of their parents’ untimely demise and begs her to come home and settle some financial matters before their family home is swept from under them by debt collectors. Amanita, or Nita as she’s usually called, is a stereotypical Stones – sharp, bloodthirsty, and not altogether sane. Nita is a terror and when she comes home dragging a man who can shift into a falcon (a gyrguardi) as her new (and forced) husband so she can continue the Stones line. In an effort to restore their family’s financial status, Nita takes on a monumental task from the royal line the Stoneses have served since the founding of their country to kill a powerful magician called the Blackbird Bride and her twenty-four magician spouses. This takes her away from Stones Manor for great lengths of time and there’s also a nice seven year time skip to progress the story to the point where it really begins to take off.

Lanie on the other hand is less typical, as she has spent much of her life sequestered in another wing of the house and raised by the undead servant of the Stones family, Goody Graves,  so her odd allergy to violence (a defining trait of necromancers) wouldn’t be as frequently triggered. She’s surprisingly good considering that most of the Stones necromancers were sinister on their best days and murderously evil on their worst. Don’t be fooled by the lengthy description of Nita Stones – Lanie is truly the main character of the story, but you have to have a grasp on Nita first. Lanie is fiercely protective of her family, particularly her strange little niece Datu, and those she cares for like Canon Lir and a few new friends made along the way. Obviously, this means when the Blackbird Bride seeks revenge for her slaughtered magicians Lanie must really step up and own her dark powers.

This story is immensely character-centric and while there is some lovely worldbuilding going on it’s rather small scale. Individual locations are nicely detailed and you can feel the warmth and homeliness or conversely the cold boney-ness. There’s so much going on that I understand the folks who were put off by being introduced to a dozen gods and goddesses and new months and days of the week right at the start. But honestly, it’s mostly irrelevant information. The deities show up here and there, but they aren’t terribly important for most of the book and you can throw memorizing new days/months right out the window if you want. Not important – just fluff. The important things are more or less explained as you read the book, though you should be prepared for so much new vocabulary! 

This book has so many things for so many kinds of readers, but the most important is that you like strange, quirky stories unlike anything you’ve read before. The range of feelings this book can induce is wide and varied. I mean, literally everything from horror at the site of gruesome murder  to unrequited love and all the things in between. It’s really quite something and Saint Death’s Daughter will likely continue to reign supreme as the weirdest book of 2022. I wouldn’t mind seeing more books set in this strange, diverse world of magic and interesting lands.