Top Shelf for April: Grave Mercy

I loved this book.  I loved it very much.  And I’m not the only one on staff who did.

Here is our review by Wil Barbour, our Inventory Manager for BookKids and the Teen Section:

When I first started to read the new young adult novel Grave Mercy: His Fair Assassin by Robin Lafevers, I thought “Man, this is dark”. It’s set in 1485 in English-speaking Brittany, which is in western France. Ismae Rienne has grown up with a scar from the poison her mother used to try to get rid of her in the tomb. Now it’s her wedding night and her coarse, turnip-farming husband sees her body the nuptial bed and recognizes the scarring as the mark of the daughter of St. Mortain, the Breton god of death. Angry and abusive, he calls for a priest to decry her as an abomination.

But then the town priest whisks Ismae off to the Abbess of the convent of St. Mortain where – get this – she is trained to be a handmaiden of the god of death; one of a slew of female assassins trained to kill bad men. Robin LaFevers goes on to weave a novel of court intrigue in 15th century Brittany where the women of the convent work to keep the Duchess Anne in power and to preserve the Breton way of life.

See? Domestic violence, unwanted pregnancy and a late Middle Ages view of women. Pretty damned dark. But lots of teen writing has dark tendencies today. If it’s not monsters and nightmare creatures, it’s dim dystopian futures, or plain old depression and teen angst. The writing in Grave Mercy is sharp and beautiful. It’s still dark by the time Ismae is trained as an assassin, but now it’s fun. As I was reading, I could imagine the cinematic treatment of this book where Ismae takes out her targets in slow motion with daggers and swords flashing, hair whipping around and the soft fabric of skirts and dresses flowing with grace.

And of course, there has to be some romance involved. It is medieval France, after all. Still green in the eyes of the convent, the young Ismae is sent undercover to duchess Anne’s court as the mistress of the handsome and scheming Duval, who may or may not be true to Brittany and Anne. Distrustful, our assassin bristles at the courtly procedures and her ignoble status as plots emerge full of death, deceit and treason. And when you add the sexual tension of learning to trust Duval, take it from me, the whole thing works like a mix of Femme Nikita; a feminist, anti-French Three Musketeers, and a slice of Game of Thrones, with far less overt violence and far more poison. I can not wait for the rest of this series. Such rich characters. Such solid writing. Such a great voice from Ismae, full of youth, confidence and sometimes doubt in believable amounts. Simply amazing.