Synopsis:
Once there was an island where the dead walked the earth, and seven noble houses ruled by the arcane secrets of necromancy.
A conqueror’s blade brought them low, burning their libraries, killing their lords, and extinguishing their eldritch magic.
But defiant against the new order stands the House of Teeth and its last living members: beautiful Marozia, the heiress to the House, and her cousin, the uncanny Lady Agnes.
Though she has not spoken a word in seven years, Agnes is the true carrier of the House’s legacy. And she has her orders. She must recapture the secrets of death magic and avenge her family’s fallen honour. She must arrange the betrothal of her beloved cousin Marozia to Liuprand, heir to the conqueror’s throne, for access to the forbidden library in his grotesquely grand castle.
Revenge burns in Agnes’s heart, but so do stranger passions – and it is Liuprand, the golden prince, who speaks to her soul. This passion is as treasonous as it is powerful, poisoning the kingdom’s roots and threatening to tear the already shattered realm in two.
For Agnes’s final order is the gravest: She must not fall in love.
Review:
WE ARE BACK. This is peculiar and unhinged.
The silent Lady Agnes, more akin to the dead than to the living, is the cousin to the heiress to the House of Teeth, the shadow to her beauty. When her cousin is betrothed to the Prince, heir to the conqueror’s throne, Agnes joins her cousin and tries to find revenge in the tomes of the library. However, their creepily close relationship is strained as the cousins of the House of Teeth learn to survive the darkness and horrors of Castle Peake.
Her silence was as much a choice as any speech had ever been. It was not withdrawal, not cowering. As she had discovered, silence was not the absence of a thing. It was a force in and of itself. She brandished it like a sword. She impressed it upon the world.
First of all, this has a richly dark and grotesque history and covenant that is made more intricate by the politics of the Houses.
The relationships (familiar, friendships, husbands, royalty) are at the heart of this depraved book. Every character is restrained, confined, and defined by who they can associate with.
Ava Reid’s writing is what makes this so callously cruel, crude, vile, and depraved. Passages of obsession, of lust, of vengeance. Certain parts made me feel filthy just reading it, which is the intent. Others made my heart ache.
“I would give you all you wish for,” she whispered, “if there were not half the world between us.”
His lips pressed to her ear again. “I feel nothing between us now.”
Agnes felt herself dripping for him. “You are reckless with your desire, and all my reason is undone by your mouth.”
This is Reid returning to their roots. This is ugly, bleak, and garish – a folktale filled with blood.
I didn’t looove how thinness was elevated as a beauty standard. Can we excuse/forgive this due to its gothic aesthetic? I’d struggle to accept it to this extreme.
The ending was disgusting and heartbreaking. What other books can you say manage to pull that off?
P.S. this is definitely adult.
I did not realise this was a first of a duology.
I read book one six months before release and now have to wait for book two?!! RIP. Quite literally.
Leave a Reply