Wicked Saints

Wicked Saints

By Emily Duncan

A girl who can speak to gods must save her people without destroying herself.

A prince in danger must decide who to trust.

A boy with a monstrous secret waits in the wings.

Together, they must assassinate the king and stop the war.

In a centuries-long war where beauty and brutality meet, their three paths entwine in a shadowy world of spilled blood and mysterious saints, where a forbidden romance threatens to tip the scales between dark and light.

 

 So, partway into this book, I was like, "This is boring." A most grievous sin!  It did pick up a bit when the various people made it into Tranavia, but honestly, the book did not live up to that spectacular cover, which, ah, is obviously not supposed to be the reason you judge books, but by golly, that's a good looking cover.  

Anyway, we get introduced to three main characters: "the cleric" - a young woman who is apparently the only magic person in Kalyana, "the prince" - who is the crown prince of Tranavia and trying to kill the cleric to end the war between the two countries, except that only lasts for about one chapter and then he's called home to be a human sacrifice for his father, and "the monster" who isn't given any POV narrative, so we know he's hiding something, which is that he's apparently the leader of the magical cult in Tranavia which gave the king the idea to kill his son to win god-like powers in the first place and then... felt bad about it? Except it was all a fake-out so he could leave and come back, cleric in tow, and then ended up using the cleric to kill the king so he could take the king's powers... I don't know, it was kind of a mish-mash by that point.

Look, I know it's the start of a trilogy, and you gotta save something in the tank for the next two books, but this didn't entice me to keep going, even though it had more action than Black Sun (one of my bigger complaints about Black Sun).  I never really cared about the characters, there was no real oomph to it.  So it opens with the cleric's monastery getting attacked by the prince, and then she flees, and that part was all great, but then the prince gets called back home and she meets up with a conveniently placed band of travelers, who happen to include people going over to kill the king, and she just, trusts them immediately, tells them who she is, and goes along with the plan.  Well, okay, then. 

The most we get to know about the prince (even though he narrates a good chunk of the book) is that he likes to drink and his father wants to kill him, which makes him sad.  That revelation means absolutely nothing, since we're barely given any other insight as to their relationship - was it always bad, is he mad about this, will this upset his mother, etc., etc. He doesn't even visit his mother when he gets back, just a witch who does prophecies (for plot reasons, I assume).  There's no familial feeling, so I'm not getting any anguish when he decides he needs to kill (rather than be killed by) his own father.  None of these characters had any personalities! The prince came the closest, and his main character trait was "drunk".  

And the cleric's voices in her head/gods thing is confusing.  I assume that will be explained later in the additional books, but you've got to have more background than: "this country thinks gods run everything,  this other country does it's own magic, both think the other are awful, and there's some random "god" people forgot about who is also doing...something and also the gods are actually demons." And the cleric uses the power the gods send her to do magic, but apparently she doesn't need them and can just do it on her own, soooo.... they're just chatter boxes? Then how come they don't whisper in everyone's ears? Seems really inefficient, if they're trying to take over another country to rely on just like, one lady.  Are we to assume that there's other people who also believe they are the hands of the gods, but are just, you know, chilling? If the god/demons have some agenda, they're certainly not doing much to move it forward.

This just didn't grab me, and that's not even about all the reviews that are comparing it a knock-off of the Grisha-verse, because I didn't like that series either.  I did read the whole Grisha thing though (albeit in chunks so it felt very disjointed).  This one, I think I'm calling it a day.