Natalie Monroe's Reviews > Red Sister

"Choose carefully, Nona. Let the Path lead you to a name."

Nona opened her mouth. "Cage," she said. "Let them call me Cage."

Red Sister is what you get what you combine Arya's arc from Game of Thrones with Harry Potter.

There's stabbing and friendship. Magic and religion. Illicit potions and assassin lessons. Red herring villains and badass mentors. A "Chosen One" and prophecies.

You'll notice I put quotation marks around "Chosen One" because it's not what it seems. Everyone thinks Nona is the Chosen One after she arrives at the Convent of Sweet Mercy, fresh from the executioner's block, to train to be an assassin. Born a hunska, one of the four godly tribes, she is extraordinarily talented for a girl of eight and has more hand-eye coordination than I do while holding a cup of milk.

BUT there's a curveball. And another curveball. And another. This entire book is basically me getting hit in the face with curveballs, from the moment I noted the teenage-ish cover model and then discovered Nona is under twelve years old throughout the whole book. Except for sporadic chapters from the future (present?), we mainly track Nona's childhood in the village to her life in the Convent.

One of those curveballs is Ara. Beautiful, rich, and skilled, she's despised by Nona from the very beginning.

You can imagine how I reacted.



But Nona grows to realize she's wrong. She discovers Ara is actually a really nice person, a loyal friend, and first impressions aren't everything.

"Ara's crimes appeared to be confined to being beautiful, being born rich and bring the Chosen One. Everything else, Nona realized, was something given to her by Clera or something assumed."

(I lowkey ship them. I know they're not old enough yet, but shhhh, let me dream of the future.)



The world-building is woven seamlessly with the narrative. It's too complicated to explain and my goldfish of a brain no longer remembers the specifics, but know there are absolutely no info-dumps. Everything is presented to us naturally and smoothly.

All in all, I'm excited to see Nona grow into her cover model. And do more magic, stabby stuff.

ARC provided by the author