(no subject)
May. 1st, 2024 10:05 pmI just finished reading Vespertine off dhampyresa's rec -- this is a first-person YA fantasy about a Special Girl and although I often find myself allergic to those these days I enjoyed this one extremely.
The Special Girl in question is Artemisia, who has a traumatic past of having spent most of her childhood possessed by an evil spirit before being exorcised by helpful nuns. Now she is a nun in training herself with a pure heart, a sincere religious devotion, an extremely feral demeanor, and profound social anxiety who wants nothing more than to spend her whole life peacefully blessing corpses and interacting with other humans as little as possible. (This is a very haunted world where any un-blessed corpses are factually and inevitably going to rise again as ghosts.)
Alas for Artemisia, a surprise ghost attack results in her unexpectedly inheriting a saint's relic attached to an extremely powerful revenant and using it to save her convent. Most nuns who wield revenant relics are trained to ensure that they can't hear the voice of the revenant; however, since Artemisia is extremely untrained and perhaps even more anti-social than the thousand-year-old hungry ghost, she and the revenant find themselves kind of vibing!
Also, the revenant would much rather be possessing Artemisia than stuck back in a relic, so in between making ominous pronouncements and attempting to suck the life force out of other living beings it spends a lot of time nagging her to eat and take naps lest she die and ruin this whole sweet situation.
Artemisia and the revenant spend the rest of the book attempting to solve the conspiracy of Why There Are Just So Many Evil Spirits while dodging both the growing legend of her sainthood and the hot and ambiguously evil priest who wants to bring her in to church authorities. The latter is vaguely love interest shaped and I think if the book had ended up having its semi-planned sequels would probably have become more firmly so, but as of this text (which right now looks likely to be the only one) the most important relationship is definitely between Artemisia and the revenant, with a sideline on ( midbook spoilers )
I also really enjoyed reading a book in which the heroine is very genuinely devout -- Artemisia believes wholeheartedly in the church and her experiences with it up to the point the story begins have been nothing but positive -- while the book around it does such a good job problematizing the religious worldbuilding and pushing at her to consider her faith in a more complex way.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dhampyresa called this "Joan of Arc meets Venom"; I, not remembering that, was thinking of it while I was reading as "Sabriel meets Venom" but I think dhampyresa probably has more the right of it.
The Special Girl in question is Artemisia, who has a traumatic past of having spent most of her childhood possessed by an evil spirit before being exorcised by helpful nuns. Now she is a nun in training herself with a pure heart, a sincere religious devotion, an extremely feral demeanor, and profound social anxiety who wants nothing more than to spend her whole life peacefully blessing corpses and interacting with other humans as little as possible. (This is a very haunted world where any un-blessed corpses are factually and inevitably going to rise again as ghosts.)
Alas for Artemisia, a surprise ghost attack results in her unexpectedly inheriting a saint's relic attached to an extremely powerful revenant and using it to save her convent. Most nuns who wield revenant relics are trained to ensure that they can't hear the voice of the revenant; however, since Artemisia is extremely untrained and perhaps even more anti-social than the thousand-year-old hungry ghost, she and the revenant find themselves kind of vibing!
Also, the revenant would much rather be possessing Artemisia than stuck back in a relic, so in between making ominous pronouncements and attempting to suck the life force out of other living beings it spends a lot of time nagging her to eat and take naps lest she die and ruin this whole sweet situation.
Artemisia and the revenant spend the rest of the book attempting to solve the conspiracy of Why There Are Just So Many Evil Spirits while dodging both the growing legend of her sainthood and the hot and ambiguously evil priest who wants to bring her in to church authorities. The latter is vaguely love interest shaped and I think if the book had ended up having its semi-planned sequels would probably have become more firmly so, but as of this text (which right now looks likely to be the only one) the most important relationship is definitely between Artemisia and the revenant, with a sideline on ( midbook spoilers )
I also really enjoyed reading a book in which the heroine is very genuinely devout -- Artemisia believes wholeheartedly in the church and her experiences with it up to the point the story begins have been nothing but positive -- while the book around it does such a good job problematizing the religious worldbuilding and pushing at her to consider her faith in a more complex way.
dhampyresa called this "Joan of Arc meets Venom"; I, not remembering that, was thinking of it while I was reading as "Sabriel meets Venom" but I think dhampyresa probably has more the right of it.
