Saint Death's Daughter
Sep. 25th, 2025 08:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asakiyumeWhat a breathtaking book Saint Death’s Daughter is. Truly magnificent in all respects: its exciting, imaginative story, its absorbing, immersive worldbuilding, its soaring writing, and its sharp, compassionate observations about human nature. I loved it completely.
It’s been a long time since I walked into a book and lost myself so entirely in it, so much so that I wanted to bring pieces of it back with me into this world. Can we have sothaín meditations, please? Can we have these twelve gods? … But just certain select pieces! Because the other thing about the world of Saint Death’s Daughter is that it’s cheerfully vicious and merciless—not always and everywhere by any means—but plenty enough. Take the fact that our protagonist, Miscellaneous (Lanie) Stones, comes from a family of assassins and torturers. And there are similar people in high places throughout the story. But the folks Lanie’s drawn to are nothing like that at all. We’re more than our family history, and we can make different choices—that’s the grounding hum that vibrates through the story. Lanie sets herself to make amends for the harm her family’s done: tries, fails, and tries again, all while growing into a powerful necromancer with a deep devotion to Doédenna, Saint Death.
Now I never thought I would love a necromancer. Necromancy is not my thing! Not into the undead, thank you very much! But I loved the thoughtful way necromancy works in Saint Death’s Daughter--what it means. The revenant dead are dreaming they’re alive. And they can be sung back to sleep. I loved Lanie’s tender relationship with the revenants she creates (and one who was created before her time).
I think maybe it’s this: my impression from a distance about necromancy in novels, games, and visual arts etc. is that it’s used for its thrill and horror value. Unstoppable, mindless troops. In my mind it also drifts into zombie territory, since zombies are revenants, but not through necromancy (except when they are), and with zombies, there’s the body horror of decay and putrification.
But Saint Death’s Daughter doesn’t treat it like that. It profoundly honors the mystery that is death and explores, delicately, thoughtfully, what it means to be the wakened dead, dreaming they’re alive. And the difference between that and living. And how the dead are our past, our personal past, and the past of our planet, and how that’s part of us, I guess? Remarkable. Like this description of Saint Death’s invisible cloak:
More generally, CSE Cooney’s way of writing gods/magic/Mystery is right up my alley (and always has been: I loved her Twice-Drowned Saint)
Now I want to swing the spotlight round to something entirely other: CSE Cooney’s affectionate and perceptive way of writing about people. Like this:
(About Havoc, another character says, “bless your prism eyes, that see rainbows trapped in the plain plumage of your fellows.”)
And then there’s just the beauty, exuberance, and humor of CSE Cooney’s language:
About a dress: “If lava were kindly, if rainbows were warm, if stars smelled of orange blossoms—these, then, Lanie felt, would be the raiment she stood up in.”
About an expression on someone’s face: “so clear and shining it was like a window you could fly right through.”
Havoc upbraiding Duantri: “Tits and pickles, Duantri! Yaknow I don’t speak high heathen. Talk urchin, wouldja?”
About a way of walking: “Even blunted by soft-soled house slippers, orange with gold embroidery, [Tan’s] stride implied a bright herd of stampeding beasts.”
About a theater company: “‘One night for fright, one night to get it right,’ went the Footlight’s motto, a theatre infamous for short rehearsal periods and even shorter runs.”
So those are some of my reasons for loving Saint Death’s Daughter. It’s doing so much that it’s impossible to cover it all in a review. Lanie eventually learns to speak with more than one voice at once, with a surface voice and a deeper one (kind of like throat singing, where you sing more than one note at the same time, only Lanie’s deeper voice isn’t audible in the usual way of things). The novel is like this too: it’s speaking in a surface voice and in many other voices as well. It’s broadcasting on many frequencies; you can hear many, many things.
It’s been a long time since I walked into a book and lost myself so entirely in it, so much so that I wanted to bring pieces of it back with me into this world. Can we have sothaín meditations, please? Can we have these twelve gods? … But just certain select pieces! Because the other thing about the world of Saint Death’s Daughter is that it’s cheerfully vicious and merciless—not always and everywhere by any means—but plenty enough. Take the fact that our protagonist, Miscellaneous (Lanie) Stones, comes from a family of assassins and torturers. And there are similar people in high places throughout the story. But the folks Lanie’s drawn to are nothing like that at all. We’re more than our family history, and we can make different choices—that’s the grounding hum that vibrates through the story. Lanie sets herself to make amends for the harm her family’s done: tries, fails, and tries again, all while growing into a powerful necromancer with a deep devotion to Doédenna, Saint Death.
Now I never thought I would love a necromancer. Necromancy is not my thing! Not into the undead, thank you very much! But I loved the thoughtful way necromancy works in Saint Death’s Daughter--what it means. The revenant dead are dreaming they’re alive. And they can be sung back to sleep. I loved Lanie’s tender relationship with the revenants she creates (and one who was created before her time).
I think maybe it’s this: my impression from a distance about necromancy in novels, games, and visual arts etc. is that it’s used for its thrill and horror value. Unstoppable, mindless troops. In my mind it also drifts into zombie territory, since zombies are revenants, but not through necromancy (except when they are), and with zombies, there’s the body horror of decay and putrification.
But Saint Death’s Daughter doesn’t treat it like that. It profoundly honors the mystery that is death and explores, delicately, thoughtfully, what it means to be the wakened dead, dreaming they’re alive. And the difference between that and living. And how the dead are our past, our personal past, and the past of our planet, and how that’s part of us, I guess? Remarkable. Like this description of Saint Death’s invisible cloak:
The cloak’s infinite but invisible train spilled down the sides of the tower in a cascade of interlocking bone and shell and chiton, in a hundred million fossilized leaves from trees that the planet Athe knew only in its youngest days, in chains of long-extinct insects trapped in amber, in festoons of fangs that once had studded the jaws of leviathans, in the lacework of the claws of dragons—or things out of which dragons were dreamed; in the beads of embryos that had died when they were yet too tiny to be detected by the naked eye … it fell, and though no one alive could hear it, it clicked and clacked and creaked like winter branches in a winter wind. It dragged the city streets and sank beneath the stones and trawled the catacombs below.
More generally, CSE Cooney’s way of writing gods/magic/Mystery is right up my alley (and always has been: I loved her Twice-Drowned Saint)
“When people gather in great numbers, holding festivals across the land to celebrate the gods, the gods can’t help but hear us all. They hear and remember Their creations. Their attention brightens on us, even as our attention summons Them nearer, and, and…” …
Tan finished for her “… and all creation grows more marvelous with the All-Marvel. And thus, the magic surges for all true believers, for magic is the memory of the gods.”
Now I want to swing the spotlight round to something entirely other: CSE Cooney’s affectionate and perceptive way of writing about people. Like this:
Haaken’s was not a warmth like Duantri’s, nor was there in him much evidence of the tenderness Mak was capable of. Haaken was more like Tan, with her beacon-black eyes that shone their penetrating lights on everyone with equal curiosity. Or like Havoc, ready with her wry smile and dry wit and her life’s load of hard-bought wisdom. Or like Canon Lir, who, when you stood in front of them, no matter how you babbled, listened as if you were the only person in all of Athe.
(About Havoc, another character says, “bless your prism eyes, that see rainbows trapped in the plain plumage of your fellows.”)
And then there’s just the beauty, exuberance, and humor of CSE Cooney’s language:
About a dress: “If lava were kindly, if rainbows were warm, if stars smelled of orange blossoms—these, then, Lanie felt, would be the raiment she stood up in.”
About an expression on someone’s face: “so clear and shining it was like a window you could fly right through.”
Havoc upbraiding Duantri: “Tits and pickles, Duantri! Yaknow I don’t speak high heathen. Talk urchin, wouldja?”
About a way of walking: “Even blunted by soft-soled house slippers, orange with gold embroidery, [Tan’s] stride implied a bright herd of stampeding beasts.”
About a theater company: “‘One night for fright, one night to get it right,’ went the Footlight’s motto, a theatre infamous for short rehearsal periods and even shorter runs.”
So those are some of my reasons for loving Saint Death’s Daughter. It’s doing so much that it’s impossible to cover it all in a review. Lanie eventually learns to speak with more than one voice at once, with a surface voice and a deeper one (kind of like throat singing, where you sing more than one note at the same time, only Lanie’s deeper voice isn’t audible in the usual way of things). The novel is like this too: it’s speaking in a surface voice and in many other voices as well. It’s broadcasting on many frequencies; you can hear many, many things.
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Date: 2025-09-25 01:48 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2025-09-26 12:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-26 12:48 pm (UTC)(But I know for myself, sometimes I just enjoy reading people's reviews without particularly wanting to read the book, so that's fine too)
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Date: 2025-09-26 03:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-26 03:45 pm (UTC)Even me: I didn't read this as concentratedly as I would have at some other points in my life. What was good about it was that it somehow managed to swallow me up even for the short periods of time that I was reading at any moment, and it was vivid enough that when I returned to it, I fell right back in without that where-am-I, what's-going-on feeling.