The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy

Megan Bannen
Completed 2/6/2025, Reviewed 2/6/2025
3 stars

This was an okay romantasy which I read for in-person book club.  It’s got zombies, although the nature of the zombies was intriguing.  And it has torrid parts.  However, I thought the torrid parts were rather pedestrian.  Compared to the intense scenes in The Fourth Wing and its sequel, it seems more like a Harlequin romance.  Still, I thought the book was generally entertaining albeit a little soapy.   It has two more books in the series which I probably won’t read.

The story takes place in a universe where the soul resides in the appendix.  Something has happened so that souls don’t go to the unnamed god upon death.  Instead, they wait around and take over a newly deceased body and reanimate it.  There are Marshalls destroy the bodies by disrupting the appendix.  Then the bodies are taken to an undertaker to be prepared for the afterlife.  Mercy is the daughter of an undertaker waiting for her brother to return from undertaking school.  Being a woman, she’s not supposed to run such a business.  However, she loves salting the bodies, reciting the rituals, and building the wooden boats that take the bodies to the afterlife.  Hart is a Marshall.  Since their meeting, Hart and Mercy have hated each other.  

One day, Mercy receives a letter addressed to “A Friend” from the magical owl mail deliverer.  She begins a pen pal relationship with the friend, falling in love with the idea of him.  Unbeknownst to her, the letters are coming from Hart.  Neither knows who the other is, until they try to finally meet.  Craziness ensues.

It’s an interesting take on relationships, although I think it’s been done in other genres.  It’s just that this time, the setting is rather interesting.  The characters are pretty well developed and the prose is not to bad, except for the sex scenes.  I liked Mercy who deals with carrying the weight of the business from her father who had to retire due to a heart attack.  When her brother Zeddie comes back, he’s no help.  He flunked out of the program and finished a degree in liberal arts.  Now he wants to be a cook.  Her sister is pregnant and can’t really help much although her husband is the driver for the company.  So Mercy is between a rock and a hard place.  

Hart on the other hand is the stereotypical brooding loner.  He is assigned a partner, a very young man with no experience hunting the zombies, called drudges.  He resents being assigned a partner but does take him under his wing rather reluctantly.  The young man, Pen, is actually more interesting, acting as a foil for Hart.  In a great little side story, he starts dating Mercy’s brother Zeddie.  

The book was a relatively fast paced book.  It took a little time figuring out the universe, though.  But I zipped through the last hundred or so pages in no time.  I thought the book in general was predictable, yet the ending was well-done.  The star of the book though is the setting and the mythology.  There’s just enough description of the old gods and the new gods and the migrating souls to keep you somewhat engaged.  

I give this book three stars out of five.  It’s good, just not good enough to pull me into the whole trilogy.  In addition, I’d rather read Rebecca Yarros for straight romantasy, or gay romantasy, like the early works of TJ Klune, which I will return to now that I’ve finished this book.  

Wolfsong

TJ Klune
Completed 1/26/2025, Reviewed 1/27/2025
4 stars

I just love TJ Klune.  I had the pleasure of reading his most recent novel Somewhere Beyond the Sea towards the end of last year.  This year, one of my challenges is to read a bunch of his back catalog.  This book is the first of the Green Creek series.  It has recently been republished by Tor, as it was originally either self-published or published by a small indie house.  Anyway, I loved this book.  It’s a gay werewolf romance that includes themes of family, love, and acceptance.  Like all his later books, there is something warm in reading his books.  They celebrate positive queer representation in the characters.  In addition, the characters were well developed and the world building was terrific.  It’s almost like he did research on real werewolves to produce the mythos here.

The plot is rather complex.  Ox’s father left when he was young.  He reinforced that Ox was slow and that people would shit on him his whole life.  When his mother came close to losing the house, he got a job at the auto repair shop that his father worked at.  The owner there helped him and his mom out.  When Ox was sixteen, he met a ten-year-old boy who immediately attached to him.  Turned out he was the son of a pack of werewolves.  He is the alpha heir, training with his dad to take over when the day comes.  Joe, the boy, draws Ox into the family.  Soon Ox and his mom become part of the pack even though they are still humans.  Back story on Joe:  he was kidnapped and tortured by an evil werewolf.  Joe’s father imprisoned him magically, but now, years later, the evil one escapes and is searching for Joe and his family.  

Ox is an awesome character.  He starts out the slow-witted, quiet boy that his father reinforced in him.  But once he meets Joe and joins the pack, he begins to grow, gaining confidence, albeit slowly.  Ox is the narrator of the story as well, so we have an in depth look at the inner development that happens.  

The others in the pack are also terrific.  I was surprised at how much personality Klune was able to inject in each of them.  We know Joe the most, of course, as his relationship with Ox is intense.  As they grow up, they become very attached.  When Joe is seventeen, Ox realizes they are attracted to each other at an incredibly deep level, but only now figures out it is sexual as well.  He also discovers that Joe has chosen Ox to be his mate, an unprecedented thing as Ox is still human.  In addition, Ox is terrified of his feelings because Joe is not yet eighteen and there is a six-year age difference between them.  This may give some readers some pause, but the relationship is handled very well.  Nothing happens for three years, during which time half the pack, led by Joe, leaves to search for the bad werewolf and his gang.  

The one issue I had with the book was that I thought the emotional suffering that Ox goes through when Joe and part of the family leaves went on for way too long and way too intensely.  It was often hard to read Ox torturing himself inside over the events surrounding Joe’s leaving.  The book is just over five hundred pages and it seemed like the whole last third of the book was anguish Ox felt over Joe’s absence.  However, it does illustrate the bond of the wolf pack and the connect between Ox and Joe, as well as with other members of the pack.  And of course, I’m leaving out a lot of spoilers that explain why the feelings are so intense.  I just felt it went on too long.  

There are so many other characters that were really well drawn, including Joe’s parents, his brothers, Ox’s mom, the owner of the auto shop and the small group of mechanics, and the girl Ox dates briefly before he realizes the true nature of his relationship with Joe.  Even the bad wolf and his associates were multi-dimensional.  Klune somehow breathes life and personality into all his character creations.  

I give this book four stars out of five.  I knocked it down one star because I grew tired of being inside Ox’s anger and anguish.  Otherwise, I just loved this book.  I’m so excited to read the remaining three books in the series, which I’ll be doing in between my book club selections.  

Locklands

Robert Jackson Bennett
Completed 1/20/2025 Reviewed 1/21/2025
2 Stars

I didn’t care for this last installment of the Founder’s Trilogy.  I really liked Foundryside, the first book.  I thought Shorefall was kind of meh.  This one was a slog to get through.  It had action, it had tension, it had a plot, but I was tired with it within a hundred pages.  It took me over two weeks to finish.  It had no humor in it, even though Clef was back.  There were some new characters who I didn’t understand.  And I feel like the trilogy fell into the familiar format of Book 1: Save the world; Book 2: Really save the world; and Book 3:  OMG, SAVE THE WORLD!

The book picks up eight years later.  It begins with our characters in a fierce battle.  Almost immediately, one dies.  Berenice feels responsible.  Then our gang finds out that Trevanne is trying to find a way to destroy and reset the world.  So they set on a quest to find and stop them.  This takes them on progressively more dangerous missions as they try to get close to Trevanne while outsmarting them.  In the meantime, Clef goes on a painful journey of self-discovery of his past through visions.  He starts to put together what happened before he became a key, and how that relates to the current chaos.  In the meantime, Sancia and Berenice, who married eight years before, must consider the sacrifices they must make to make sure that Trevanne is defeated.

One of the big things I didn’t like about this book was the magic system.  The major form is scriving, and there’s a subclass of scriving called twinning.  Scriving is a way to give something powers or convince something it is not what it is.  Twinning entails creating duplicates so you can hide an original something.  People aren’t supposed to twin.  In Shorefall, Sancia and Berenice twinned so that they were able to communicate telepathically.  In this book, everyone was twinned.  Hence, most of the dialogue was telepathic.  And with the scriving, all the battles became battles of getting enough scriving done to change the way things were happening.  I found it often confusing and rather tedious.  So rather than enchanting us with the magic like in the first book, I felt overloaded by the magic.

I also would have liked Sancia to remain the main point of view character.  Instead, it was Berenice.  I like her, but I think after two books where Sancia is the POV, I would have adapted easier to this book if she remained as such.  However, the switch did make for a much more dramatic and intense end.  The end and the epilogue were actually quite well done.  It was the one time I wanted to keep reading.  

One thing I didn’t quite get were the characters of Design and Greeter.  It seemed like they were entities composed of many people who had given their consciousness to one central sense.  It was not like the hosts enslaved by Trevanne, but a voluntary thing.  Why people would do that, I never figured out.  Later in the book, one of the secondary characters joined Design, which perplexed me.  And I didn’t get how they physically interacted with the main characters.

I give this book two stars out of five.  I was really disappointed at how disinterested I was with it.  Nothing really grabbed me until the end, and at well over five hundred pages, it took much too long for the end to come.  I have one of Bennett’s Shirley Jackson Award winning horror novels as well.  One of these days, I’ll get around that.  Hopefully, it will be more like a first novel, being a standalone.

Somewhere Beyond the Sea

TJ Klune
Completed 1/2/2025 Reviewed 1/3/2025
5 Stars

My goodness!  I am so loving Klune’s work.  Everything I read by him just seems amazing.  My hopes for this sequel to The House in the Cerulean Sea were not so high.  But as I read, I gently returned to the island where Arthur and Linus raise the magical children in a healthy environment, as opposed to the dastardly wishes and actions of the government.  It is a worthy sequel to its predecessor. I loved this book.  

The book opens with a jump back to when Arthur first returned to the island orphanage where he was abused as a magical child by a horrific headmaster, meets Zoe the island sprite, and begins rebuilding the house as a safe place for magical children.  Then it jumps to the present, where Arthur and Linus are raising the children we met in the first book.  All seems well, until Arthur is summoned to appear at a hearing about the welfare of the children.  He is informed there will be an on-site investigation.  The investigator is not like Linus.  Instead she seems determined to take the children away.  Arthur and his family do everything they can to throw a wrench into her investigation, but she is ruthless.  And it is not enough, leaving Arthur and Linus as well as Zoe and her girlfriend Helen to try to find a way to turn the tide of the government’s abusive practices on magicals.

It's hard to review a book when enamored with everything about it.  I loved the main characters, of course.  But even the baddies from the government agency are multidimensional, showing cracks in their cool, evil exteriors that make you, and them, see their humanity.  And the messages the book conveys are so good, too.  Like the quandry of what to do when confronted with hate.  Lucy, the seven-year-old Antichrist, most specifically has to deal with his desire to just send the bad people straight to Hell versus everything that Linus, Arthur, and the other children have taught him.  Another is the embracing of problematic words.  A new child, David, is a yeti and wants to be known as a monster even though that word is discouraged by the family because it is used as an offensive slur.  It’s similar to the embracing of the word queer in the LGBTQ+ community, taking the power away from it and making it something beautiful.  

I think this book is a little more philosophical than the first, with more discussions between Arthur and Linus with the children.  But it’s hard to notice when the discussions are so playful and healthy.  However, like the multidimensionality of the bad people, Arthur and Linus are not just angelic goodies.  They, especially Arthur, must keep their cool despite the inner desire to lash out.  Arthur must deal with his magical side, as a phoenix, which threatens to give the government the excuse it needs to remove the children from Arthur and Linus.  

I just can’t say enough wonderful things about this book.  I loved the writing, the dialogue, the action, the development of the children, and so many other things.  Klune’s books are simply cozy reads despite the conflicts that move the plot forward.  One of my goals this year is to read some of his earlier catalogue, which has recently been republished.  I realize earlier works may not be up to par with his newer works, but I’m willing to take that chance.  I give this book five out of five stars.