I’m back from Death with surprisingly positive things to report.
Yes, there are wandering (and sometimes oozing) souls. Yes, there are grotesque creatures. Yes, at one point something might try to crawl into your mouth. There are dark forests and haunted cities, stretches of quiet punctuated by the more-than-occasional reminder that something freaky here would very much like to kill you. Time doesn’t work properly. Getting home is complicated. Tripadvisor would probably have more than a few bad reviews.
I, however, had a lovely time.
And that’s because Meg Smitherman’s version of Death in “Deathsworn” is vivid and beautiful — a place I was quite happy to wander through for a few hundred pages.
Granted, Jonquil Foye has considerably less fun there. She’s an animancer (a spellcaster and -creator of Life magic), and she’s fighting for Lux in its seemingly endless war against the necromancers of Umbra. On the other side is Edmund Blackburn, the Duke of Death (c’mon, that moniker!!???), Umbra’s masked and thoroughly terrifying necromancer general — who also happens to be the man Jonquil blames for her mother’s death. When a duel between the two goes utterly and spectacularly and completely wrong, their magics collide to create something terrible and dump them both into Death.
I gasped when I first read the back-of-the-book premise because it’s eerie and weird and Gothic and all the things I love to read in what I call The Ber months. Life and Death initially look like nice and neat little opposites: two cities, two magical traditions, two enemies standing on opposite sides of a war. But Smitherman complicates that divide, suggesting that Life and Death might not actually be opposites at all. They depend on each other. They work in harmony. They belong to the same cycle. And Jonquil and Edmund, naturally, have more in common than either would particularly like to admit.
As a result, the relationship here has more weight than the now-too-typical “how unfortunate; my mortal enemy is hot” setup. Jonquil and Edmund are smart, capable, slightly sadistic, deeply flawed adults carrying around enormous amounts of grief and guilt. Smitherman is particularly adept at writing that grief; Jonquil’s relationship with her mother wound up being one of the most interesting parts of the book for me. And Edmund’s battles give him (a bit and maybe not totally enough) more substance than just “mysterious masked death man,” although, to be clear, I support having mysterious masked death men as just a concept.
And somehow, the book moves FAST. “Deathsworn” is only 368 pages — hallelujah! a romantasy author has finally remembered that books don’t need to be a 700-page first installment ending on a cliffhanger with six sequels on the way — and Smitherman packs a lot into those pages without making the book feel thin. Her writing is lush and intelligent. The trek through Death is quiet, but it’s never empty: The descriptions are eerie and vivid, the horror is creepy, and Death has a dreamlike quality.
The realm’s strange time elasticity does some serious heavy lifting to explain how quickly Jonquil and Edmund’s relationship develops. I was willing to go with it. Mostly. There’s banter, chemistry, shared trauma, and mortal peril. But I still wanted a little bit more between “I no longer want to murder you” and “I’d murder someone else for you.” The enemies worked immediately. The lovers needed just a little more development. The supporting characters could’ve used more room, too; so much of the book belongs exclusively to Jonquil and Edmund that everyone outside their sweet little Death bubble started to feel more plot functional than fully formed.
And once Jonquil and Edmund return from Death, I started losing track of what, exactly, was happening. Stuff — alliances, attacks, potential solutions to this deadly construct that previously didn’t really have a solution, magical revelations, and political decisions started arriving so quickly and so frequently that I could only really understand the broad strokes while having no idea why something was happening right then — or how everyone had gotten there.
That became my biggest problem with this book: Smitherman kept giving me interesting ideas that I wanted her to push further. I wanted more of the history between Lux and Umbra. Why are these cities still fighting? How did an animancer-versus-necromancer divide turn into generations of war? Why does a secret duel have the political power to determine anything? What’s going to happen next, assuming the Big Bad Evil Magical Talking Ball Thing is defeated?
Most of those questions were things I could roll with because I was having a good time with the book. But that constant feeling that everything needed just a little more depth and explanation followed me all the way to the end.
I actually like what Smitherman was going for with the almost-certainly-going-to-be-controversial ending. Handled a bit differently, I think it could’ve been perfect: poetic and bittersweet and emotionally devastating in exactly the way a story this preoccupied with grief, guilt, Life, and Death should be. But “Deathsworn” rushes through its final stretch so quickly that the ending never quite gets the chance to hit me right in my feels and left important arcs feeling unresolved (and made earlier political and character development feel less consequential). The relationship needed more time for its final choices to carry their full weight; the political story never completely reconnects with the war that made the opening so compelling; and after spending so much of the book teaching me about its magic, the final magical resolution somehow left me with more questions about how any of it actually worked. The pieces were there. I just wanted Smitherman to spend more time putting them together.
So, yes, I have notes for my tour guide. But I’d still happily book another trip to Death.
Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing me with an e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
