Book Smart Kate

Book: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Audiobook: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Spice: 🌶️🌶️

by Megan Bannen – @thenewgirlsbookclub reads a different genre each month and July was our paranormal month. I love that our book club pushes me outside my typical genres and helps me to find books I wouldn’t have otherwise. Below is my honest review of just such a book!

With her dad’s failing health and siblings consumed by other things, Mercy is single-handedly running her family’s undertaking business on the edges of Tanria, a harsh but magical world. Despite being overworked and worrying about keeping the company afloat, she’s usually pretty friendly to marshals who drop off bodies to be prepared for the next stage of their journey, except when it comes to the wildly irritating and annoyingly handsome Marshal Hart. Although Mercy sees arrogance, Hart is lonely and spends long periods patrolling barren and dangerous lands, steeping in that loneliness. His loneliness drives him to pen a letter to no one in particular and drop it in the post. In this magical world, the unaddressed letter finds its way to Mercy, and unknowingly, she begins a tender, heartfelt, anonymous correspondence with her nemesis.

I was fascinated by this unique, completely foreign, and yet relatable world. I enjoyed the depth of the relationships, the goals/fears/anxieties behind the characters’ actions, and how invested I became in every character’s backstory. I also liked that there was a mysterious problem they were trying to get to the bottom of that both pushed Hart and Mercy together and kept them apart. The actual typography of the world was really unclear to me. I couldn’t pull together a cohesive image of it in my mind. Was it a harsh desert or was part of it water? Part of this felt like a sci-fi western (see: Firefly, god my husband is going to love that I referenced Firefly). So, in a way, I’m forgiving some gaps in the structure because I found it fascinating. It’s a tough and tender book that is the first in a series I’m looking forward to continuing.

The audiobook is a highly enjoyable dual narration!

What is you favorite fictional book world?