#Saint Death’s Daughter

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads

Saint Death’s Daughter

slowbuilding and intricate queer fantasy in a world with 12 gods and different forms of magic

Miscellaneous “Lanie” Stones, a necromancer born into an infamous family of royal assassins who’d rather stay away from All Of That, has to call her dangerous older sister back home to deal with family debt

but she causes some much bigger problems, and leaves Lanie to deal with them, plus her child and the child’s traumatized father

a revenant housekeeper. a vengeful 7 year old with too many knives. a parliament of wizards who turn into birds. a dog called underwear. there's a lot going on in here

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

his daughter is not a weapon!

[ourstaturestouchtheskies]

Joan of Arc Praying - Eleanor Fortesque-Brickdale // Joan of Arc - William Etty // Strangers - Ethel Cain

[the-z-part]

I've been trying to figure out how to pitch Saint Death's Daughter to the Locked Tomb girlies because like they have a lot in common, but at the same time the tone is super different, so if you go into SDD expecting TLT you'll be wrong but also I really think they'll like it!

And it just came to me:

Saint Death's Daughter is the Barbie to The Locked Tomb's Oppenheimer

[morkaischosen]

You've read Saint Death's Daughter? Oh, hell yeah

yeah!! absolute banger of a book. things I love about it include the sense of humour, the absolute commitment to the elaborate grotesquerie of the Stones' gothic history, that gorgeous note of queer community that shows up midway through, the way the presence of the divine is written, and of course aaaaaall those Women's Wrongs.

[drastrochris]

Hi! Go read Saint Death's Daughter!

Do you like Gideon the Ninth, and Harrow, but want to think about if she were sunshine and rainbows?

Let me tell you about Lanie Stones!

She's got:

This whole religion thing around her.

Toxic relatives.

But if SexPal was royalty.

Best friend: Dead friend.

It's a baby. I'm not going to be a jerk to a frickin' baby.

Did you order the skeleton war? I've got a delivery here for "skeleton war," and it has your address.

[literary-illuminati]

50 pages into Saint Death's Daughter and I will admit that my extremely uncharitable first reaction is 'publishers have really noticed The Locked Tomb, huh"

[lesmisscraper]

The Last Moment of Valjean, Volume 5, Book 9, Chapter 5.

Clips from <Il cuore di Cosette>.

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Saint Death's Daughter | Author: C.S.E. Cooney | Publisher: Solaris (2023)

[kaerinio]

something something dany with mel medarda's makeup. something something, dany with mel medarda's makeup, but in targaryen red instead of gold.

[aroaessidhe]

read in 2023: ghosts

The Immeasurable Depth of You

All That Consumes Us

The Spirit Bears Its Teeth

Saint Death’s Daughter

Sixteen Souls

Painted Devils

Radiant

He Who Drowned The World

She Is A Haunting

[jetwhenitsmidnight]

Saint Death's Daughter by C. S. E. Cooney

Publisher: Solaris

Genre: Fantasy

If you like:

Necromancers who love pink 💕

The Locked Tomb series

Found family

Queernorm world-building

Skeletons and bones

Intricate magic systems

Footnotes!

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5

Synopsis

Lanie Stones, the daughter of the Royal Assassin and Chief Executioner of Liriat, has never led a normal life. Born with a gift for necromancy and a literal allergy to violence, she was raised in isolation in the family’s crumbling mansion by her oldest friend, the ancient revenant Goody Graves.

When her parents are murdered, it falls on Lanie and her cheerfully psychotic sister Nita to settle their extensive debts or lose their ancestral home—and Goody with it. Appeals to Liriat's ruler to protect them fall on indifferent ears… until she, too, is murdered, throwing the nation's future into doubt.

Hunted by Liriat’s enemies, hounded by her family’s creditors and terrorised by the ghost of her great-grandfather, Lanie will need more than luck to get through the next few months—but when the goddess of Death is on your side, anything is possible.

Content warnings

death, murder, violence, torture, kidnapping, slavery

gore, body horror, blood

familial abuse, child abuse, domestic abuse: physical, verbal and emotional

parental death

self-harm for magic purposes

abusive relationship

animal cruelty, animal death

grief, depression

fantasy racism and xenophobia

physical confinement

childhood chronic illness

alcohol

Review

Saint Death's Daughter is the first book of the trilogy, followed by Saint Death's Herald, but it wraps up the main arc well-enough that it can be read as a standalone.

This is a wildly ambitious novel that, according to the acknowledgements, took over ten years to write? and it shows. The amount of world-building that goes into the gods, the magic system, the different countries as well as their respective cultures and forms of governance is simply astounding.

Although the synopsis is an accurate summary of the events of this book, every turn still took me by surprise, and I never knew what to expect.

Our protagonist, Miscellaneous "Lanie" Stones is full of heart and gumption. I loved her love; Lanie loves her friends and her reanimated creations and life and Death so earnestly and sincerely, with her whole heart, in spite of her upbringing. I'm also obsessed with the fact that, even though she is a necromancer, she loves bright colours and dressing in poofy pink dresses.

Not to say that this book is all sunshine and rainbows; Lanie goes through it, and this book turned out to be much darker than I had expected. (Check the content warnings!) But she manages to get through it with her newfound friends and family.

It's also really interesting how Lanie has a literal allergy to violence; violence is basically a given in most fantasy novels, so reading about how Lanie navigates violence in a world full of nothing but was fascinating.

Honestly, I could go on about this book for hours, but I think it's best to go into this knowing less about what happens.

[ourstaturestouchtheskies]

Scenes from the Life of Joan of Arc - Albert Maignan // Strangers - Ethel Cain

[randombookposts]

Saint Death's Daughter Review

Just finished reading Saint Death's Daughter and I really like it, will share my thoughts below as I start the new year I wanna share more book reviews.

Non-spoiler review: I really enjoyed the unique magic system and worldbuilding of the different nations mentioned and how the worship of the gods is so effortlessly entwined into everyday life there. All of the characters were very well developed as was the relationships between them. My only complaint was that it was very difficult at times to understand the writing style as a lot of the words that were used were very archaic.

Spoilers below

What I loved most about the series was how it went in several different directions and wasn't at all like I was expecting. When Lanie is introduced as a teenager I thought she would stay that age and journey with her sister as a precocious coming of age story but then boom the time skip happened, she got a niece and Nita was killed a quarter in. I thought Nita would play a much bigger role and maybe become nicer or at least less of a threat but I'm glad the author went the direction she did and that part of the story centered around Nita's influence on the characters after she passed. I also love the parallels between Nita and the Blackbird Bride, both as users of fascination against Lanie. Love the non-binary rep in Canon Lir, I'm still confused about the plot twist, he was the Blood Royal and the fire priest, there was no twins??? Loved the found family dynamics with Havoc and Duantri and Tan and Mak and Datu. Lanie learning to open up and let in people and trusting in her relationship with Saint Death was fun to read. Her relationship with Goody, her telling Goody her real name and releasing her to Saint Death's cloak...... *sobs* that part made me so sad, but it was so good. Overall, I really liked it and I'm guessing it's a series cause there's so many loose ends with Canon Lir and the Skrathmandan family and Grandpa Rad lol.

[itsalittlebitchilly]

I'm halfway through a book rn and I'm tearing my teeth out trying not to look it up on tumblr bc I want to see what people are saying but I don't want to be spoiled

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 67 – Saint Death’s Daughter by C. S. E. Cooney

This is a book I’ve been vaguely aware of for a while, without really knowing anything about it beyond that it was getting a lot of positive buzz, but it got a WFA best novel nomination and that provided the impetus I needed to finally give reading it a try. And, well, I’ll be honest – this was a slog for me. If it had been half the size it would very likely be one of my favourite works of the year; as is the best way I can describe the reading experience is ‘slowly drowning in cotton candy’.

The book stars Miscellaneous ‘Lannie’ Stones, younger daughter of a declining noble house which has provided executioners and assassins to the royal family of Lariat since its founding, and generally but not lately provided necromancers as well. Lannie is the hope of the family, a necromantic prodigy (if one with a profoundly inconvenient allergy to violence that requires her isolation from the rest of the family and her raising by a bound revanent nanny and the dubiously trustworthy ghost of an ancestor). As the story opens, her parents have both died, and she’s been forced to write to her terror of an elder sister to come home as their debts are called due. She comes home with an enscrolled and deeply unwilling fiancee abducted during her studies. This, surprisingly, only takes up the first small chunk of the book, followed by a timeskip, the introduction of Lannie’s niece born in the interim, the elder sister dealing with the consequences of her seven-year campaign of bloody vengeance against the foreign court which murdered their parents, and the beginning of the actual plot.

I really did want to enjoy this book, and on the page-to-page level it was often somewhere between charming and delightful. But there were just so many pages, and so very little happening on most of them. After the timeskip the book spends something like 500 pages just leisurely meandering, stopping whenever anything catches its interest to spend half a page or three enthusiastically describing it. At a certain point the exuberant narration and playful vocabulary stop feeling delightful and start feeling like the author is somehow being paid by the word.

This is made all the odder by the fact that around the 80% mark the book suddenly realizes its got a bunch of problems to resolve and switches into an entirely different gear, rushing through revelations and resolutions like it’s on a deadline. Which apparently it was? The book ends with what feels like less of a sequel hook and more like a final hundred pages were chopped off the finished product by a longsuffering editor pushed past the brink.

So, the lion’s share of the book is interested less in plot than character dynamics and cute slice of moments. It’s very much a found family sort of narrative, delivered in an incredibly blunt fashion. Which definitely works for a lot of people, I’m sure, but everyone was so obviously written to be endearing and charming and fell into love of various sorts with each other so instantly it just left me cold, and more a bit bored.

This is a book with footnotes, and among those it feels pretty middle of the pack? Not doing anything particularly impressive with them, and they don’t have a real character or voice different from the rest of the book, but they’re a fun enough way to infodump a bunch of Stones family history (particularly all the ways different members have died).

Thematically...look, I’m aware this is entirely a personal pet peeve not shared by any particular audience, but the fact that Lannie’s whole life from infancy is being chosen as the beloved priestess of a goddess of death for one specific purpose, and that this is portrayed as an entirely benevolent, positive, and uplifting thing to have done at basically all points that it’s discussed just sets me on edge. There’s nothing really badly done about it, I’m just a contrary maltheist by nature and the book did basically nothing to allay that.

Generally – I don’t know, I’m not opposed to 700 page books (I’d be an utter hypocrite if I was. Almost certainly still am regardless), but I feel like being that long is a failing the book then has to justify? It should be obliged to do something with the length, if it’s going to demand so much of my time to wade through it. This didn’t really feel like it did.