Red Sister

Mark Lawrence is one of my favourite authors. The Broken Empire series is in my top ten all-time greatest, and The Red Queen’s War, although not quite as jaw-droppingly amazing, was still thoroughly enjoyable. So when it came time to listen to Red Sister, I had very high expectations, and to begin with, they weren’t met.

This book is a slow burn. A damned slow burn. I’m a bit of an action junky and need a fair kick up the arse early on plot-wise to snag my interest, and Red Sister’s pace proceeds at a glacial rate (insider joke). For the first third of the book I was contemplating dropping it and starting something else a bit more lively, but I stuck with it, and I’m glad that I did. This book was never going to be some action-saturated romp across a magical and mystical realm, but what it does do extremely well is develop characters and build an entirely unique and 100% believable world within which they exist. And by the end, I was happy enough with the time I had spent listening.

To start off with, Nona Grey is a deep character. She’s our leading little lady (the book starting with her at the tender age of around 9), but you quickly begin to forget her young age due to her rather grown-up actions and thoughts. She doesn’t come across as particularly childish, but we can safely attribute that more to her harsh life than a lack of writing skill on the part of Lawrence. The same can be said for almost all of the other young women Nona finds herself in school with, training to be what are effectively nuns, though some of these nuns are as likely to take your eyes out with throwing stars as they are to take confession. The world of Sweet Mercy’s Convent and the women that live there is so well fleshed out that you find yourself entirely engrossed within not just the oddities that take place there but also the mundane acts, and that theme runs true for the entire book.

The world of Abeth is one of the most interesting I have ever come across in any book, not because it is jam-packed with interesting and amazing creations, but because the premise of its founding and impending demise are both so original and so well thought out. The planet’s icecaps are spreading little by little, crushing what is left of the human race upon the planet into the Corridor, an equatorial band of maybe 100 miles in width that runs around the entire planet, and with every squeeze of ice, the kingdoms and peoples huddled within the Corridor are crushed and driven to greater extremes. It is within this desperate and slowly choking existence that our story takes places, and the bleak inevitability that their world is slowly coming to an end taints all aspects of the universe Lawrence has created. It is depressingly beautiful. The magic system, on the other hand, is a little wishy-washy. No real measurable properties to it, in stark contrast to the logical cause and effect premise of the world Lawrence has built. Some people of certain bloodlines are just capable of certain magical acts with little tangible explanation as to how or why, but so few individuals are capable of accessing these gifts that it’s lack of structure doesn’t really cause any plot holes. A little more specifics as to how it actually works would have been nice though, especially from an author who can create such wonders in the details.

This is a good book for people that like a lower paced novel full of deep personal struggles and stark reflections on reality. I, however, am not one of those people, but I can still appreciate its quality. The story itself is full of twists, turns, and despicably evil bastards which Lawrence is rather adept at creating, but it is also full of truly human characters, with all their faults, foibles, and glimpsing chances for redemption. The second book has a lot of potential to scratch those itches that Red Sister lined up but never quite met, so I found myself downloading Grey Sister as soon as I finished this book, and in the end, doesn’t that mean that I was entertained?

The narration was top quality, although I did have one issue. Due to the voice that Helen Duff used for Nona’s portrayal, the Nona in my head was a good few years older than the Nona in the book. I know this is partly caused by the very adult events of Nona’s life, but I could never quite picture her as the little girl she was supposed to be. But aside from that, Duff’s portrayal of all the other characters was fantastic.

Personal Score: 3.75 stars

Professional Score: 4 stars