The survivor of a brutal academy must exhume her own past in the first book in a new series from the international bestselling author of the Library Trilogy and the Broken Empire series.

Set a thief to catch a thief. Set a monster to punish monsters.

The Academy of Kindness exists to create agents of retribution, cast in the image of the Furies—known as the kindly ones—against whom even the gods hesitate to stand. Each year a hundred girls are sold to the Academy. Ten years later only three will emerge.

The Academy’s halls run with blood. The few that survive its decade-long nightmare have been forged on the sands of the Wound Garden. They have learned ancient secrets amid the necrotic fumes of the Bone Garden. They leave its gates as avatars of vengeance, bound to uphold the oldest of laws.

Only the most desperate would sell their child to the Kindnesses. But Rue … she sold herself. And now, a lifetime later, a long and bloody lifetime later, just as she has discovered peace, war has been brought to an old woman’s doorstep.

That was a mistake.

In The Book that Wouldn’t Burn Lawrence put librarians front and centre in his story with the protagonists searching for and into books in an infinite library, although their stories spilled beyond the stacks into action and peril beyond the library’s capacious walls and that same violence bled back into the library.

In Daughter of Crows Lawrence gives us a more overtly combative protagonist and a more martial training ground. The Academy of Kindness is a misnamed place whose purpose reminded me of Reginald Hill’s detective novel A Killing Kindness.  Hill’s story also draws on a Hamlet quote – in the wake of murdering Polonius

I do repent: but heaven hath pleas’d it so,

To punish me with this and this with me,

That I must be their scourge and minister.

I will bestow him, and will answer well

The death I gave him. So, again, good-night,

I must be cruel only to be kind:

Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.

The Kindnesses who run the academy are anything but ‘kind’ and the tension between different manifestations of ‘cruelty’ and ‘kindness’ form the driver of the book’s plot. In Lawrence’s hands the two are not really opposites as different approaches to murder.

In Daughter of Crows, Lawrence has produced another excellent and absorbing story, full of his usual smoothly seductive and thought-provoking prose.

Such as this observation on aging

Age took the beauty that I never recognised when it was mine. It dressed me in this tapestry of scars, and for each one of them sown silver through my skin a dozen others lie to deep to see.

Or this nod to those who have finally descended from that initial peak of the Dunning-Kruger curve

It exchanged a confidence born of ignorance, for a fear of knowing that I don’t know.

Also – because this is on mind of late – a passage that spoke to me of a moment in Minneapolis.

The signs that someone is about to commit an act of violence vary wildly. Those without the proclivity will need to build themselves up to it, like a horse galloping towards a high fence. They become loud, angry; their complexion may darken. Sweat and trembling herald the storm.

In those familiar with such acts, the indicators are smaller but just as certain for one with eyes to see. Only the broken minded, in whom compassion, fear and excitement are flattened to almost nothing, can surprise the wary. And even those may give themselves away by the necessary preparation, the positioning to gain advantage, the blocking of exits and the like.

The book bears some structural similarity to Lawrence’s earlier work Red Sister in that there is a framing story of a protagonist in peril built around episodes of back story from school/training days. The back-story is also a single-sex, girls ‘educational’ establishment with an unusually martial curriculum and a cavalier approach to student safeguarding that would make an Ofsted Inspector blench. (Indeed both schools teach many other ways to make an Ofsted Inspector blench 😊 ). As with Red Sister the precise connection between the present-time protagonist and the many sort-of-school children of the past is elided by Rue’s name not appearing on the class rolls of yesteryear.

However, with Daughter of Crows the framing story offers a fuller narrative of different episodes and locations than Red Sister’s tense combat scene of Sister Thorn facing down Lano Tacsis’s army between the pillars. Also, the protagonist of Daughter of the Crows present-time story is not some fearsome combatant in the full flush of youthful power, but a somewhat more mature woman, which is refreshing to see. Where Anna Smith-Spark has written about mothers journeying through middle age, Lawrence’s Rue is more at the crone end of the maiden-mother-crone spectrum.

The school aspect of The Academy of Kindness is also more brutal even than the merely cavalier approach of the nuns at The Convent of Sweet Mercy. The place is more Squid Games than Hogwarts, with student deaths being a matter of bona fide school policy rather than regrettable accidents.

This does make the book feel distinctly darker than Lawrence’s usual merely Grimdark writing and in places the story veers into the realms of outright – but creative – horror. Interleaved with the framing story and the backstory are episodes describing the tortures that a character merely named ‘Eldest’ is subjected to in a house of torments that could have given Edgar Allan Poe nightmares.

Lawrence’s characters leap through a succession of frying pans and fires both in the past and the present as he weaves these apparently unrelated threads together through a mix of OMG reveals and jump-scare twists.

With death as a constant companion a reader might grow wary of getting too attached to individual characters, but the stories of those who fall by the wayside are still compelling and death in this strange world is not entirely final. At least not while there are darker forces than Miracle Max and his cure for the ‘mostly dead’ walking the twin islands of Gog and Magog.

I enjoyed the way Lawrence intermingled magic and myth, with ideas of memory residing in the brain and anger residing in the heart and the confluence of those two elements, like circles in a Venn diagram combining into a thirst for revenge. The Kindnesses are agents of that retribution, filled with the divine power of a long dead fury they ensure that the unforgiveable crimes of others do not go unpunished. But even those who are a nemesis to others might find themselves pursued by their own nemeses.

As an aged Rue seeks retribution for lost friends, she is herself pursued by forces that strain to reach her from both sides of the grave. The undimmed fire of Rue’s iron will contrasts with the frailties of an old body that cannot answer the calls she makes on it as swiftly or surely as in her youth. While Daughter of Crows is a pleasingly complete opening to the Academy of Kindness trilogy, Lawrence teases us with questions about what else has happened between those long ago school-days and the present-time of manufactured wars and desecration of ordinary lives. There are names of characters we have yet to meet, or reacquaint ourselves with which make this an intriguing set-up for the books that will follow.

But in Rue, Lawrence has given us a different kind of protagonist: bitter with life’s experience but not broken by them; withered but not entirely weakened by age; resourceful, but not respectful; careless of her own life, but not of her friends. She is the oncoming storm that will not die.

In particular, Lawrence prompts thoughts on the aging process and that strangeness of being the same person we always were – yet also incalculably different from who we used to be.

However, despite what she felt, what she knew was that the child she had been and the young woman she became were different, just as the young woman and the old one were different. One might reach back as the other reached forward and grasp the offered had. Perhaps even embrace. But they were not the same person. If they were the same, then what purpose had those passing decades of experience served? If living life had not changed her had she truly lived it? To claim the facts of her existence were simply that: a growing list of things that had happened, rather than structural parts of her nature, was to cheapen them, to rob them of meaning.