I’ve run though my list of Books I Got For Christmas, so the next list I need to tackle is Books I Should Have Read Ages Ago. We’ll start with C.S.E. Cooney’s utterly delightful novel from 2022, Saint Death’s Daughter.
The novel opens with a letter from our central character, Miscellaneous Immiscible Stones (the names are just one of the things that are so delightful about this book), and the news that her parents, Abandon Hope Stones and Unnatural Stones (see what I mean?) are dead. Suddenly. Suspiciously. And Miscellaneous’s (Lanie for short) budding powers as a necromancer weren’t able to bring them back. Worse, they were terrible at money matters, and now the woman who holds all of their debt is threatening to take the Stones family mansion and everything in it as payment.
Lanie isn’t going to be much help to solve the problem, because the fifteen-year-old necromancer, daughter of a famous assassin and a royal executioner from a family known for producing assassins and executioners and necromancers is…allergic to violence. Not sensitive to it, magically and severely allergic. Slap someone in the face in her presence and Lanie’s face will temporarily show the handprint. She can’t touch someone with a history of violence without having a full-body reaction; even particularly violent children’s rhymes can cause her to break out in hives. And Gods help her if someone is stabbed to death nearby because her own heart might bleed out and die.
So while Lanie would really prefer to stay in her bone-lined workshop, bringing mouse skeletons to life and experimenting with necromancy with only her hulking nursemaid revenant Goody for company, she has to reach out to her cheerfully psychotic older sister Amanita Muscaria Stones to come back from her studies abroad and save their home. This starts a chain of events that brings the Stones family to the attention of a rival country’s horrifying Queen, the Blackbird Bride.
Did you get all that? Well it doesn’t even come close to describing the sprawling, epic, delicious feast of a book that C.S.E. Cooney has created.
Good God, where do I even begin? Lanie’s home country of Liriat and the surrounding nations have enough information here to fill ten books. Royalty, religion (including an entire pantheon of gods), local customs and festivals and the particular magical specialty of each region, it’s all here, and all delivered in a way that never feels like an exposition dump. Every single chapter includes fascinating information about death magic, or how language shapes the way people think and interact, or lovingly detailed descriptions of each of the Blackbird Bride’s spouses (including what their individual brand of sorcery is and what type of bird they transform into), or how the bond between a gyrgardi and their gyrlady works. That last one comes into play very early on, and it’s an excellent example of just how psychotic Lanie’s sister is.
This book can be dark (and not really because of the overwhelming amounts of skeletons and dead things being manipulated and brought back to life. Lanie loves the dead so much she makes the reader love them too). Cheerful as she is, Amanita (or Nita) is a horrible, terrifying person. Her childhood bullying of Lanie included several instances of ATTEMPTED MURDER. She isn’t just narcissistic, she doesn’t seem to have any idea that hurting other people to get what you want, or just for fun, is extremely wrong. Her underhanded methods to try to save the Stones Manor cause all kinds of tragedy and end up putting the entire family in the cross-hairs of extremely dangerous people. And some of the things their enemies are willing to do for revenge are only bearable because for the most part we don’t get to see them happening firsthand, just their after-effects.
This book can also have a lot of very dark humor. Lanie’s closest companion, the revenant Goody, talks so little that Lanie has interpreted an entire language based on the different types of Goody’s silences. Lanie’s youngest relative is training herself to become an assassin, and she has to be handled very carefully because she’s confident in her ability to kill all their enemies. By herself. At age six. With a toy crossbow. Lanie’s most important teacher is the ghost of her famous grandfather, who’s trapped in a padlock of a sarcophagus containing the spirits of the wizards he killed, can’t be trusted any further than Lanie could throw said sarcophagus, and who complains all the time.
The rest of the Stone family ancestors are even more strange, and we get bizarre little tidbits about all of the famous assassins, executioners, and scientific crimes against humanity in the footnotes. I think C.S.E Cooney has joined the ranks of Phil and Kaja Foglio and Terry Pratchett in writing some of the best footnotes in the industry. The information is so random, out-of-nowhere weirdness, sometimes deeply, deeply upsetting, and also hilarious.
But most of all this book is absolutely joyful. Lanie grew up sequestered in her manor, and even though the family spends a lot of time on the run, in hiding, and trying not to be slaughtered, they’re doing it in the middle of the main city of Liriat and it’s everything she dreamed of. There are new friends and music nights in a cozy cafe and glorious food and a chance to explore her relationship with her oldest friend, Canon Lir, who appears to be exactly as besotted with Lanie as she is with them, and it’s lovely. There are at least four chapters devoted to the High Holy Fire Feast of Summer Solstice, where everyone’s costume is either a flamboyant representation of their inner soul, or a flamboyant representation of the exact opposite of their inner soul, and every page is just flowing with beauty and fun.
Even Lanie’s death magic is joyful, whether it’s her delight in reviving an entire pocket full of mouse skeletons, or the overwhelming spectacle of communing with the Saint of Death herself (or any number of other Lirian gods).
The author has the joy is tinged with a beautiful sadness too, because by it’s very nature death magic is something that can’t last forever. Or at least it’s not supposed to. Lanie having to sing a goodbye lullaby to her beloved mouse friends on the same day that she brought them back to life made me teary-eyed. And Lanie has a lot more goodbyes to say (or has the opportunity to say goodbye taken away), because she has to keep learning her strengths and her limits, and to find ways to fix the legacy of all of the awful things her family has done over the years.
I’m not sure it’s fair to say this is a coming-of-age story, or at least not just for Lanie. Every character changes and grows throughout the story. Everyone is a tangled mess of their trauma and their family history and their prejudices and obligations and dreams. Lanie’s young relative is given a stern talking-to at one point for threatening to kill people, and it’s the most brilliant example of parenting I’ve seen portrayed on paper. Yet somehow that parent is able to become a trusted friend of Lanie despite being repelled by everything about her. For reasons that are damn hard to argue with. “Complicated” doesn’t even begin to describe the relationships in this book. And this is definitely not a “love conquers all” book, so don’t waste any time thinking you can figure out who ends up with whom by the end.
In a way I’m glad I waited so long to read this. The first book was apparently many years in the making, and it’s was only recently announced that there’s going to be a sequel. There’s quite a bit more of story to tell for Miscellaneous Immiscible Stones and her improbable found-family, but we’ll have to wait until spring of 2025 to get it. Hopefully I’ll be able to find time to reread this gem sometime before then, since I’d like to linger over the festivals and fun a little more without being quite so worried about how the next inevitable tragedy will mess things up.