Hey guys! I told you the next review would come out quickly and here we are with a new review!
KRISTEN’S REVIEW:
Carrion Saints is the story of Crow, who is an immortal – one of two kinds in this world, Monsters and Saints. Crow is a Saint, and is meant to be hunting and killing Monsters. Specifically, Crow is hunting and killing four very specific Monsters, the Four Great Adversaries. She only has one more to go, and it is The Woman in the Hills, but it turns out that the Woman in the Hills has very specific powers of suggestion and command, and Crow is very much not immune.
The Woman in the Hills, AKA Magnolia, is a severed head most of the time, and all she really wants is to leave the aforementioned Hills, and she wants Crow to carry her, and Crow must do as she is bid, whether she likes it or not, so off they go, and shenanigans ensue.
This was an interesting read, to say the least. Crow and Magnolia get up to some very, very strange adventures, and meet some very strange people along the way.
This one is subtitled as a ‘Sapphic Fantasy Romance’ which I think is a bit of a misnomer. It is certainly sapphic, and ends in… what could be labelled as a romance, but this book is long, and romance doesn’t even start entering into it until well past the halfway mark. Closer to the last quarter. This is just a straight up (lol #notsorry) fantasy with a sprinkle of romancey tropes thrown in.
I love this author’s writing style. This was a very easy book to just sit down with for hours at a time. The prose easily evoked this strange world and the strange beings that inhabit it. I did like Crow, and to a lesser extent Magnolia eventually. I liked how snarky Magnolia was.
There is a connection here between this book and the other book by this author I have read (The Forest at the Heart of Her Mage) which is not necessary to understand either book, but was a nice nod anyway.
My biggest problem here was how long this one was. This book was long, y’all. Especially considering this is a self-labelled romance in which the romance doesn’t start showing up until it is nearly done. It could have been a lot shorter. There are adventures here that didn’t seem necessary to anything but giving Crow and Magnolia more time together, which didn’t really work for me in the first place because while this can be described as an ‘ultra-slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romance all it wants, it doesn’t change the fact that one of these two was not in full command of her own decisions for… most of this story. That never felt right to me.
I loosely explained the plot to my friend and she was just like ‘…yeah that is some toxic yuri right there.’ So, take that as you will.
So, honestly I’m a bit conflicted here – I liked the writing and honestly the story was good too if I thought of this not as a romance at all, and just these two learning not to hate the hell out of each other. In that scenario, I give Carrion Saints a 7.5/10 stars.
ESME’S REVIEW:
I went into this one a little nervous because I am not a romance fan and as it turns out… this was an okay book for me. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it. What I loved most was the world, what I liked least was the romance, lol. This is par for the course for me. The world and the writing were entrancing and surreal at times, it’s what kept me going for as long as this book felt. I have to admit that I got a little bored about halfway through wondering when the book was going to pick up speed, and unfortunately, it didn’t for me. This book relies on a traveling trope/road trip, and although that let me explore a really neat world, after a while, that novelty wore off and I started to get a little antsy. That said, this is a beautifully written book and so I think it’s a “me” problem in that I wasn’t the right audience for this book. The writing is haunting, it stays in character, there’s a consistent weirdness to everything, and there are certain scenes that were gorgeous or horrific…. lol or both. It’s a difficult thing to pull off and in that sense, I commend the author for a job well done. The book felt almost like a series of short stories strung together since we’d get to little hamlets or villages, have a little adventure, and then head off to the next little adventure. I tend to prefer something a little more cohesive and novel-esque.
I did not like Magnolia, and I think this was a huge issue for my enjoyment. If I don’t like both characters in a romance then it’s going to fall short for me, and I just did not like this character. I did, however, very much so like Crow… so there was at least something for me to sink my teeth into as far as enjoyment of the characters. Magnolia is an asshole and I just kinda kept hoping she’d somehow die. This romance was a pairing of a horrible sadistic bag of dicks (actually a decapitated head) and a fairly heroic character who tries to protect humanity and I just didn’t buy the romance.
This is a shared world book, so if you’ve read Hiyodori’s other novels you’ll get nice cameos and you’ll understand the world a bit better than someone who goes into this book cold. That said, there’s no reason that you must read other books first. This book absolutely does pass the stand alone test and I don’t think anyone who is unfamiliar with this author would feel lost, you’ll just get little treats if you have happened to read their other works.
This was a very difficult one for me to rate since I feel like most of my complaints are not due to the author’s craft, but due to personal taste.
My score is a 6.5/10