Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

"Friendship is, well, it’s caring for somebody more than you do yourself.""Fool, that’s not friendship, that’s love."-The Doctor and Zagreus, Zagreus audio drama Red Sister is the third series to come out by Mark Lawrence, who holds the position as the third most famous grimdark author alive after George R.R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie. Indeed, he might be the second most famous since George R.R. Martin doesn't self-identity as that sort of author. His first series, The Broken Empire Trilogy, showed a Lelouch-esque boy genius destined to conquer the world like Alexander and prepared to sacrifice his soul in the process. The second, The Red Queen's War, followed the corrupt lothario Prince Jalan as he struggled to avoid doing the right thing as such always ended up being difficult. Both took place in the Hundred Kingdoms and were delightfully dark fantasy. Red Sister, by contrast, takes place in a new world called the Corridor. Much like the previous volumes, it is a Medieval fantasy world but eschews the post-apocalypse elements to take place in what appears to be a planet suffering an ice age. It stars Nona Grey, a young peasant girl who is sold to a slaver who sends her briefly to the fighting pits before she ends up "rescued" from the noose by the region's militant order of nuns. In the process, Nona, makes an enemy out of a serial killer pedophile as well as his extraordinarily rich father. As the words "serial killer pedophile" are used in this description, one should note this is not going to be a story with much in the way of moral ambiguity nor is the fact the protagonist a young girl a quality which makes it lighter fiction. Some people label this Young Adult fiction due to the protagonists age while others believe this is just dark fantasy which stars children. Honestly, I think it's both and note that as a teenager, I loved reading dark and horrible stuff. It's why the Hunger Games is good and its derivatives aren't. The Hunger Games was awful to its protagonists and that's what made it awesome. So is Red Sister any good? Oh definitely. I have some complaints but, overall, I think Nona is every bit as enjoyable as Mark Lawrence's other protagonists. She has her faults, not being nearly as smart as Jorg or as funny as Jalan, but she is tirelessly determined. In fact, Nona is aggressively ignorant of the way the world "should" work and refuses to change when people try to teach her otherwise. She just doubles down on her own self-made of honor and stabs anyone who violates it. Nieztsche may have a disciple in this world. Much of the book is devoted around the principle of what friendship really means. While this is a topic which seems more appropriate for a Saturday Morning Cartoon, Lawrence adults it up by making it clear this is about what real bonds are made of. Nona is willing to fight, die, and kill for her friends but expects them to hold to the same standard of companionship. It's a Band of Brothers-esque friendship with none of the twee despite the protagonists all being adolescents, with the exception of a few flash forwards to their adult days. The book also spends a good deal of time developing the world's magical system, which relies on the subject being from one of the world's four tribes that have occasionally inbred over the past millennium. Describing it is difficult but I'd say it's basically like someone merged Harry Potter's bloodlines with the Dark Side of the Force. Most Sisters use their fighting skills in a state of calm but Nona manages to master her powers by being in a state of perpetual barely contained fury. I liked the supporting cast as well with each of the young girls and their teachers having a strong well-defined personality. You could argue that some are "the rich one", "the royal one", and "the pious one." Also, I could spot which one of the sisters was going to turn traitor a mile away by their backstory but that didn't hurt things. I understood why Nona bonded so strongly to all the people she met and why they cared for her in return. Indeed, one of my favorite scenes is when I believed the otherwise corrupt clergy was willing to go to bat for her against a rich patron--just because she exposed how a person should be treated and briefly reminded them of their duties (as well as how much of a jackass their prosecutor was). I give credit for some really stellar action sequences. Mark Lawrence proves himself a master of sword-fighting, gore, and emotional content in the Bruce Lee sense. The Red Sisters really do master the titular words Sword and Sorcery. There's almost a dozen battles, both serious and otherwise, in the book and all of them are awesomely described. Are there flaws? A few. Despite being a nunnery devoted to teaching women how to be a cross between Red Sonja and Warhammer 40K's Sisters of Battle, the Convent of Sweet Mercy doesn't actually feel that different from a lot of Hogwarts-influenced fiction. It functions more as a boarding school for those who have the talent of magic versus a place of genuine silent contemplation for the glory of the local deity (The Ancestor). Indeed, Nona isn't devout in the slightest and gets away with heresy and blasphemy that would have gotten me a good beating in modern day Catholic school let alone ancient times. The next bit is difficult as I don't want to sound perverted but the book also is weirdly sexless. I'm aware the teenage young women are in a convent/fortress but it does seem a bit strange the subject of sexuality or attraction never comes up. When Harry Potter and company hit fourteen, they thought about it constantly because that was realistic. Nona never seems attracted to anyone nor do any of her fellow novices, which is conspicuous by its absence as they're surrounded by men (or women as a couple of characters' tastes may range). This brought me out of the story just a bit. The book also sometimes devotes a little too much to the training montages of Nona and her schooling. While that's arguably the point, the fantasy genre is so littered with magical schools and the students thereof, that it felt a little longer than they should have been. Patrick Rothfuss, at least, put blonde ninjas in his schooling of Kvothe to liven things up. I would have preferred a couple of more field trips into the Emperor's court or gladiator pits than classes where the professors try to poison you. Despite this, Red Sister is a great book and one I recommend for Mark Lawrence, grimdark, and YA fans alike. Some folk will dislike the book's central theme (friendship and what it means to have people you can trust) but I think it worked well. Nona is an excellent character and I'm interested in how she's going to develop in future books of the Ancestor series.9/10

So I'm a huge fan of Mark Lawrence. I loved his "thorns" series and he somehow managed to top that by following it up with "fools". Unfortunately I don't think this new series is on par with the prior two.Now let me start with the disclaimer that I still think Red Sister is a great book and I will be buying the sequels. It is well written, the characters are unique and feel real and the background of the book is once again a very cool mash-up of fantasy and sci-fi. The idea of living on a narrow strip of a frozen planet kept partially warm by a giant artificial moon is one very cool (pardon the pun) setting. The main character Nona is very engaging and, as is typical with Lawrence protagonists, a total badass. The supporting cast is well thought out. The plot moves at a reasonable pace and the dialogue is generally well written.All that being said, I feel like Red Sister is a fair step back from the heights Lawrence achieved in his previous works. I thought after finishing Emperor of Thorns that there was no way Lawrence could create another character as profound, conflicted and entertaining as Jorg, but then he wrote Prince of Fools and introduced Jalen. Somehow Lawrence managed through Jalen to delve even deeper into an exploration of flawed characters. Watching the prince of fools grow alongside Snori from bumbling coward to confident warlord prince was entertaining, satisfying and at times hilarious. The scene where Jalen finally pays his debt and the final images of Snori looking through the window at his friend are two of my favorite moments in fantasy. Likewise the moment when Jorg "duels" the prince of arrow in King of thorns will always stick with me for its build-up, twist and shock factor (in a good way). There were parts in both of those series that I read, then immediately went back and re-read again just to experience how amazingly they were done.Which brings me to my chief issue with Red Sister. This new story is good. You should buy it and read it and you likely won't regret doing so. But.... don't expect to hit the same highs and lows you experienced with Jorg and Jalen.Red Sister, at least for me, is much more of a conventional fantasy novel than Lawrence's other works. The protagonist is a young orphan, with a special gift, who attends an elite school to train, who discovers rather quickly she is much more powerful than she or anyone else expected, then she discovers she's even more powerful, then she may have a destiny, only its not a destiny because we don't believe in prophecy... unless we do.... Stop me if you have heard this formula before. Basically all we are missing is a wolf companion, a kindly grandfather with power (though that role may be taken by a grandmother figure here), a dark lord and a love interest. I'm kind of surprised by these issues because Lawrence definitely did not adhere to these types of conventions in his prior works.The story itself is good, but its not quite as much of a page turner as the "thorns" and "fools" series. For the first time in a Lawrence work I found myself skipping/skimming whole paragraphs (and occasionally pages) because the filler descriptions and dialogue were not holding my interest. That's typical for me in a work like the wheel of time series or some of Sanderson's stuff, but that has not been the case in Lawrence's works and that was a huge disappointment for me. I knew at points what was going to happen. There were also plot points, that I won't go into wholly for spoiler purposes, that just didn't make sense. I know in general reading (and especially fantasy) is a suspension of atypical beliefs, but there were things that happened in this book that just felt like they didn't make sense even in a fantasy world. The discussion among the novices later in the book's scene were particularly ridiculous. So many fantasy books have a child protagonist attending a school for magic, or martial arts or close-contact knitting (ok I made that last one up) and so many of them have a moment where the children decide they need to deal with a huge dangerous problem on their own instead of informing their teachers. Most books come up with a flimsy line of reasoning to explain this away. Some just put the characters in an emergent situation to force a decision. Here again Mr. Lawrence's creativity let me down. Note to the protagonist, just tell the teachers and let them handle it. There was no reason at all to do what you did on your own (and worse still the actions she took really had no major implications for the later overall plot resolution).(BRIEF SEMI-SPOILER)Also, that ending... really cool fight scene but really stupid deus ex machina solution to stopping a 900 pound killing machine. You are better than that Mr. Lawrence. You once filled half a book with hidden foreshadowing of the ultimate outcome of Jorg's duel with Egan. A magic amulet that just happens to fall into Nona's lap at the last second? Seriously? You are still the same writer that gave us Jalen crossing the river of swords in a red rage, Jorg hiding his own memories from himself to escape his deepest crime and Snorri storming the depths of Hel to see his family one more time. You are better than this.(SPOILER DONE).Sorry about that. Okay, so last but not least is that I feel the prose in Red Sister went off the rails at points. I really love Lawrence's prose. I do. Some of my friends were turned off by it in the "thorns" series because it can, at points, go from beautiful and elaborate to over-the-top philosophizing. Think of Jorg's description of his Mother's piano being interwoven with the notes from the mountain as he walks the battlefield to meet Egan, or his description of the falling note and leaves at the end of Emperor of Thorns. I feel here, in Red Sister, the prose went a little too over-the-top just a little too often. There wasn't any scene for me in this book where I thought it worked or which was particularly memorable for having pulled it off. Instead some of these paragraphs I ended up skimming or skipping through.Again, overall this is a good book and if you like Lawrence you will like Red Sister, but it is nowhere near as good as his prior works. I hope that changes with the sequels. I do like the characters and the setting, I just don't care about them or what happens nearly as much as I did with Jorg and Jalen. I remember finishing the Liar's Key and I was frothing for the completion of the Red Queen's War. I almost entered the charity bidding war he put up on his website for an advance copy of the Wheel of Osheim just because I could not bear to wait another two weeks for the end of Jalen and Snorri's story. I just don't feel the same about Red Sister. I'll pick up the sequel but I don't particularly care that it is going to take a while.

Red Sister follows Nona, a young girl from a tiny village, taken in my the sisters of Sweet Mercy Convent - which is no ordinary Earth-style convent, but one which trains girls as fighters and magic users, according to their abilities. Alongside Nona, we are plunged into a world of strange powers and nuanced intrigues.Where his previous two trilogies were set in the world of the Broken Empire, in Red Sister Lawrence has created a new world, and one which is magnificent in its originality and allure. It is a grim, difficult world to survive in, but also a beautiful one, featuring icy landscapes, glowing magic and strange architecture.The protagonist Nona is self-possessed if inexperienced. Her arc over the course of the story feels natural and intensely sympathetic. Her relationships with the other characters are nuanced, changing over time as she learns and matures.The plot is well-structured, giving a satisfying ending: it is a crafted, woven, elegant plot, with badass action and enticing subtleties.All of these little elements - the magic, the setting, the different characters' roles within the convent, Nona's skills and approaches - all come together to build something unstoppable and remarkable. 10/10.

I've long been quite a fan of Mark Lawrence so, in picking up Red Sister, I thought that I knew what to expect.Oh no! Mr Lawrence has found a whole new level of competence that lifts Red Sister even above the high standards that he's already set in previous work. This is the first in a trilogy and I have just one, massive, complaint; I've got to wait another year before getting my hands on the second in the series!The fantasy world created here will be fairly familiar to readers of previous ML works as, although a different world, it's still a sort of pseudo-medieval society that exists in a world that seems to be the Earth that we know but at some future date, when we have destroyed lots of it. As with other of his works, the world in Red Sister is not described in one, huge, lump of detail but, rather, the reader finds an impression forming throughout the entire book so, for instance, the reality of the 'Red Moon' and its 'Focus' is not immediately evident but becomes clear part way in.The main character here, Nona, is a young girl, but the gender of this character is irrelevant as the reader has no trouble at all latching on to this character. As always, all of the other characters are extremely well drawn, with a depth and clarity that draws the reader in. One thing that I would have appreciated is some sort of map of the convent, just to orientate the movements of the characters through this establishment in which so much of this story is set.Again as always, but this time even more poignantly, there are shifts in perception to deceive the reader. A story is, for example, told by one of the characters which the reader, understandably, accepts as fact and when, later, it is revealed that the narrator's view was flawed, parts of the story fall into place like tumblers in a lock.Mark Lawrence doesn't dwell, unnecessarily, on sexual matters and thank goodness for that as I'm tired of seeing other authors shoe-horn in a love interest or sex scene, clumsily, into the narrative just because someone thought that it's an essential art of every book. There's certainly no prudishness on the part of Mr Lawrence, it's just the story doesn't call for a red hot sex scene. Matters of lesbian relationships, love between women and menstruation are all covered here appropriately, so there's no dodging of issues; it's just placed into the story in a naturally proper way.The combat scenes in here are riveting and they're also very frequent, so if you've loved the gore in previous books, you won't be disappointed. Again, the gender thing is irrelevant as it isn't the gender of opponents that is a factor but simply size and strength pitted against speed and skill. Mr L never shies away from killing off significant characters and such is the case here. And, more than in previous books, heroes become villains and then, possibly, back to heroes again. One character, Yisht, kept me guessing right up until the end.Obviously, the scene is now set for the second in this trilogy; 'Grey Sister', and, for me, waiting is just agony!

Nona is an unwanted child of a small village in the middle of nowhere. She gets sold to a child catcher and taken to a fight ring. The book follows Nona's journey to the Red Sisters school of assassins.As with any school there are Clicks, betrayals, trials and pranks. Nona's rise through the school is sadly predictable and the book seems to follow a normal coming of age type theme of 'who do I trust?' and 'why do the teachers have it in for me?'It sounds like i'm not a fan of the book, which is a little harsh. Its a solid book with solid characters, but for me its just not that original. There are a few plot twists, which if your familiar with the style of book, you see coming from a mile away. I'm hoping this will improve as the series progresses but i'm not in a rush to read more.

This has everything you want in an epic fantasy adventure. Typically, it has the strong young female protagonist so beloved of Hollywood today. Nona is a fantastic, well-rounded character who fits the mold for a traditional hero's journey: absent father, comes from a by-water village and poverty, discovers magical power, gets taken in by a mentor figure (Sister Glass) etc. All of the above isn't original, but the setting is. Every aspect of the setting. It's an original religion, a completely original and very novel geographical setting, and a fabulous magic system that is complex and compelling. I enjoyed reading this novel very much. However, there are a few downsides to note. Typical of many epic fantasy stories, there's a terribly high learning curve to surmount in the first quarter of the book. Much of this is handled well "Hogwarts-style" by sending Nona to school, but it is a very complex world and magic system and doesn't benefit from being partly grounded in our world like the Harry Potter books do. And the frequent time shifts in the opening portion of the book don't help resolve this confusion. Nona has frequent flashbacks, and she's not exactly a reliable narrator, which clouds things even further. Despite these issues in the beginning, the eventual story is well worth any time invested in pushing through the confusion and trusting that it will all come together for you by the end of the book. It will, I promise, and you'll love it! :)

This is the first book I have read by Mark Lawrence and I was totally intrigued by the subject matter and the great reviews that said it was like a gritty version of Hogwarts. Amazon had a special and this was 99p for the Kindle edition, so I purchased it.Red Sister follows Nona, a young girl from a tiny village sold into slavery by her own mother for reasons not quite clear. She is about to be hanged by a local constable for a heinous crime when she is rescued by the Abbess of the Sweet Mercy Convent. Sweet Mercy Convent is no ordinary Earth-style convent but one which trains girls as fighters and magic users, according to their abilities. We go with Nona on her journey and learning as we are plunged into a world of strange powers and nuanced intrigues. We learn that there are four bloodlines in this world from the original human inhabitants. Gerants are huge and strong, Hunsa are fast and dexterous, Marjal control shadowy and elemental magic and Quantal have the ability to walk the Path pulling on the subatomic strands of the universe's fabric to see the future, connect their minds to others' or even manipulate reality. We discover Nona’s background and bloodlines at the same time that she does through her lessons and learnings.I am not a huge reader of fantasy but I like to occasional story and this storyline sounded totally gripping to me but, unfortunately, it just didn’t grab me. I am finding it hard to know what I didn’t like about this book - the plot is well-structured, I liked the characters and enjoyed learning about their skills and talents. I also enjoyed the “real life” elements in the book - as with any school there are clicks, betrayals, trials and pranks and the book seems to follow a normal coming of age type theme of 'who do I trust?' and 'why do the teachers have it in for me?' but I found Nona's rise through the school predictable and a bit boring.I agree with another reviewer that said that the beginning and the end of the book are the best parts, they are strong, make an impact and leave you open to many questions but the middle of the book really dragged for me. There was the endless monotony of the school day, which is to be expected, but it did seem to go on for a while, it was also quite hard to believe that the school girls got away with so much right under the superpowered Nun’s noses.Overall, I am glad I read this book but it took me a long time and I nearly gave up several times. I think that if you are a fan of Mark Lawrence and this genre, you will enjoy this book but I won’t be reading the rest of the series, it just wasn’t for me.