Red Sister

About Red Sister

Red Sister is the first book in Mark Lawrence's Book of the Ancestor trilogy and one of the finest entries in the grimdark subgenre to emerge in the past decade. Set on a dying world where the sun is shrinking and the only habitable land is a ribbon of warmth defended by massive walls of ice, it follows Nona Grey - a child rescued from the hangman's noose - through her years of training at the Convent of Sweet Mercy, where girls are shaped into killers, scholars, and saints. Lawrence built his reputation on morally compromised male protagonists - Jorg in The Prince of Thorns, Jalan in Prince of Fools - and Red Sister represents a departure both in gender and in emotional register. Nona is ferocious and loyal, capable of extraordinary violence and extraordinary tenderness, and her perspective lacks the sardonic self-awareness of Lawrence's previous narrators. She is genuine where they were guarded, which makes her devastating where they were merely effective. The convent of Sweet Mercy functions as a fantasy school with all the expected elements - classes, competition, friendships, rivalries - but Lawrence charges the setting with genuine menace. The teachers are dangerous. The politics of the order are corrupt. The outside world is actively hostile. And the curriculum, which includes training in rare and powerful abilities - hunska speed, marjal skills, and the blood magic of a lost lineage called the quantal - is building the girls toward a purpose not entirely clear until the story's final act. The friendship between Nona and her cohort - particularly Ara, the noble girl who chooses the harder path, and Hessa, whose disability conceals the most formidable mind in the convent - gives the book its emotional core. Lawrence can write cruelty; in Red Sister he demonstrates he can also write love. Red Sister is Lawrence at his most disciplined and most affecting, and the world he builds - cold, small, lit by a dying sun - is unlike anything else in contemporary fantasy.

Tropes & Themes