Once again I have fallen a couple of books behind so please bear with me. Grey Sister, the second in Mark Lawrence’s Book of the Ancestor trilogy, doesn’t hold up quite as well as its predecessor but that bar was so damn high my arms are shaking trying to hold it up. Being “less good” then Red Sister still puts it miles above a lot of the other dreck I’ve suffered through this year.
Anyway, book two pulls us a little further outside the Convent of Sweet Mercy as Nona quickly flees a death sentence (literally). She is still a novice but her innate skills give her advantages even some of the nuns don’t have, which raises the stakes in her bid for survival on the outside. She is hunting and being hunted and meanwhile the Abbess is trying her hand at a slick political maneuver decades in the making.
Honestly, a lot of the book does start to blur together, especially since I’ve started and finished a few others since then. But I was happy to be back in the world and happy to see these familiar characters in new situations. Especially with the Abbess you start to feel a little bit like it’s a heist novel, but the MacGuffin at the center of it all isn’t an object, it’s survival. I’m really intrigued to see where the third book is going to take me and I’m hammering through my library books quick as I can so I can get to it before I completely forget what happened here.