More fantasy with older protagonists please!
With Daughter of Crows, Mark Lawrence is giving us a new trilogy—one that is not meant to be tied back to his previous works. Despite this, I thought we might end up covering some old ground when I first read the synopsis: a magical academy that exists to train young women to become killers? Doesn’t that sound an awful lot like his Book of the Ancestor series?
Thankfully, this turned out not to be the case; the two stories are very different, both in direction and tone. As I mentioned above, I am happy to see more fantasy stories with older protagonists and Daughter of Crows really delivers here. Rue is a hardened old woman who is spurred into action when her quiet life is disrupted and her friends are murdered. Rue is dead-set on making sure the killers pay (no really, she’s mostly seeking a wergild out of respect to the deceased), but she’s also clearly passed through her autumn years and has entered her own bitter winter. No matter how highly skilled a fighter she was in the past, there is no doubt her age is catching up with her. Thankfully she has something of the supernatural on her side; not many little old ladies push themselves out of a mass grave full of pith and spite after being left for dead the way Rue does.
When we are not reading about Rue’s vengeful chase in the present, we’re taken back to the past; back to the Academy of Kindness, where young girls are shaped into the kind of individuals that can fight into a persistent and tenacious old age. Despite the name, there is nothing kind about the Academy; taking in a hundred young girls a year—usually sold by their parents—the students are subject to such a brutal training regime that only three are expected to survive. This is not the supportive environment seen in The Book of the Ancestor, this is where little girls are shaped to become the human equivalent of the Eumenides.
The curious thing is though that while we are given every indication that the flashbacks to the academy are giving us Rue’s backstory, it is not immediately clear which of these little girls is Rue in her youth. Despite this, the flashbacks do give a lot of depth to our modern day Rue—eventually. There is a delayed payoff here; the book takes a while to get into a solid rhythm when flashing forwards and backwards. It wasn’t until about half way in that I started to really see things start to connect. And just when I started to really think I had a good grasp of what was going on? Lawrence introduces a third perspective—that of child named Eldest. And the creepy, suffocating, surreal environment she finds herself in.
Three perspectives for the three furies, it seems.
Even though Daughter of Crows doesn’t share a common setting with Lawrence’s other works, it still shares a lot of his hallmarks; it’s a rather unique setting, with a protagonist with hints of the antihero to them, the bonds between young women. And Necromancy. If you’re already a fan of Lawrence, there is plenty to like here. If you’re not a fan of grim settings though? This may not be your cup of tea.
