The Merciful Crow
The Merciful Crow series, Book 1
Margaret Owen
Square Fish
Fiction, YA Fantasy
***** (Great)
DESCRIPTION: In the land of Sabor, one's birth caste determines one's gift, from the Phoenix's ability to conjure flame to the Hawk's blood magic to injure or heal, even down to the Sparrow gift for concealment and the Pigeon penchant for luck... except for the twelfth and lowest caste, the Crows. Their only birth-gift is their immunity from the illness known as the sinner's plague, and it is their divine duty under the Covenant of the dead gods to find the victims and deal them the mercy stroke, then remove the bodies before the sickness devours the rest of the settlement. Despite the fact that Sabor needs its Crows, the other castes treat them worse than animals, and some even blame them for the existence of the plague itself.
Young Fie knew she would someday be a chief of her Crow band. She was born with the power of bone magic like all chiefs, able to call power from teeth and memories from bone. But she didn't figure on Pa stepping down for a good long while. She also never figured they would be summoned by the smoke signals to the Phoenix palace; the plague hasn't touched the royal caste for five hundred years, until now. She never figured that she, of all Crows, would have to lead the Money Dance against the crown queen Rhusala herself when the royals try to short them their viatik, their fee for services rendered. And never in a thousand, thousand years of the wildest road stories and songs would she have imagined that the "bodies" they hauled away in bloody shrouds from the castle would in fact be Prince Jasimir and his Hawk bodyguard Tavin - faking their deaths to escape Rhusana's plot to steal control from the king. No matter who is on the throne the Crows suffer, but Jasimir insists that the new queen would be worse than anyone else; she has thrown in with the Oleander Gentry, a cultish group who harry and murder Crows and are determined the cleanse Sabor of their evil. Helping the prince reach his allies may offer a chance - a slim chance, but a chance nonetheless - at stopping the wholesale genocide of her caste, maybe even a first step toward being considered people instead of vermin. But that supposes Fie and their two unwanted guests survive the gauntlet of enemies Rhusana sends after them... and that, despite the boy's boastings and promises, Prince Jasimir still has any allies left in all of Sabor.
REVIEW: One sign of a good book is a hook that draws you into the first pages before you realize you're even turning them. Another sign of a great book is staying up two hours past bedtime to finish because the hook still hasn't let you go, and won't until you reach the end. By those metrics, and many others, The Merciful Crow is a great book.
The story starts with a strong lead character in Fie and a voice that rivals Martha Wells's Murderbot Diaries for compulsive readability, with an intriguing world and sharp dialog and a plot that moves like wildfire, without sacrificing worldbuilding or character development or any of the other good bits I read fantasy for. Fie is not one of those characters who has to grow into her spine and agency; from the get-go, she's more than willing to stand up for her fellow Crows, even against the Phoenix royalty, and if the bravery's born as much from knowing Crows literally have nothing to lose, it's still impressive and sets a strong precedent that never fails. Tavin and Jasimir are unwanted complications, thorns in the heels of a people already walking over nails every day (literally; their sandals are studded with nails, in no small part to help them scramble up trees and out of the reach of abusers and the Oleander Gentry murder gangs). But there's more to the pair than the spoiled castle boys she initially considers them, and there's far more to the life of a Crow than either prince or Hawk had ever understood. There's more than an echo here of systemic racism and prejudices from our own world, how the whole of a society can turn a blind eye to suffering (when it doesn't actively throw punches) and tolerate injustices in broad daylight on the flimsiest of excuses, blaming the gods or the victims or simply not wanting to make waves when everyone else seems to condone it, but the book avoids descending into preaching, making its point far more vividly through the story itself. There are a few young adult tropes at play - a girl coming of age into a harsh world and seeking to make it even a little less harsh, a little romance, a little jealousy, and so forth - but here they play as features instead of bugs, and never at any point derail the plot (unlike some titles). The story changes everyone involved, leading to an ending that is both satisfactory and not overly, unrealistically cheerful; only fireside tales get happily-ever-afters, but what Fie and the others achieve is about as good as one can manage in a complicated world. The author even includes an annotated section of the first chapter at the end, with margin notes and doodles that had me smiling. I am eagerly looking forward to the next installment, and whatever else Owen has lined up. This is definitely an author I will be watching eagerly.
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