Daughter of Crows by Mark Lawrence

Blurb:

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.

Review:

Fury.

Maiden, mother, hag. 

Sister.

Hold onto your seats because Mark Lawrence is back with what might be his darkest book to date. Having read other works by Lawrence, I can proudly say that Daughter of Crows will be sitting at the top of the list as my favorite book. Grim, bloody and wrathful, this book will scratch every itch if you enjoyed the Broken Empire or the Book of the Ancestor trilogies. If you are a reader who enjoys dark stories and you haven’t dipped into Lawrence, I highly recommend starting here. 

“The ugly hole she had been left with when the Kindness of her time mutilated her was there to shame her for her failure, to remind every class that sat before her that this woman had fallen short. The lesson here was that this was as close to mercy as the Academy came and that here, even mercy was not a pretty sight.” 

While there are back and forth shifts between the past and the present timelines, the main story takes place at The Academy. A home to the Kindnesses, they open their doors to accept 100 girls each year. Sold to the academy by their families, these girls are tested and tortured to their absolute limits where the weak are then culled like common livestock. Over the next 10 years, only three students will emerge from the cohort and be named as Kindnesses. Their training will have shaped them into perfect monsters set to exact justice in the world. Their reputation is cutthroat, casting fear into Lords and Kings. Even the gods themselves hesitate to stand in their way. 

Our main protagonist, Rue, is a hard and vengeful woman set into her gray haired years. We first encounter her as she is crawling out of an open mass burial grave spitting and cursing. Soldiers have burned and sacked her small village, slaughtering all in their path. Despite her bones being old and her strength faded, she is still cunning and dangerous. And very much angry. Her will to survive out of spite is a quality that keeps her going through seemingly impossible situations. The reason for her knack for survival? She was a graduate from the Academy. However, she has tried to bury her past, wishing to live out the rest of her days as an old woman in peace.

We become intimate with Rue as the timelines shift between her past at the Academy and the present of her tracking down the one responsible for the destruction of her village home. While her Academy days are dark and filled with blood, she does form friendships that will eventually grow into sisterhood. One might even go as far to consider it a trauma bond. Lawrence excels at crafting deeply layered characters, allowing readers to feel as though they are growing alongside these girls. I would normally touch on these supporting characters, but due to the way this book is set up with some expertly placed twists, I do believe it would cross the line into spoiler territory. 

“The people know what we do here. They speak of it in whispers, but the unspoken part is deafening: if we do this to ourselves—what will we do to them?”

In my opinion, this is just one of those books you wish you could enjoy again for the first time. From page one the action kicks off and ratchets up with every chapter. Many characters are going to meet their death. Some will be quick, some slow, and some so downright terrible that you put the book down for a moment to process what you just read. Despite the dark nature of this book, there are some lighthearted themes of friendship and survival woven in. 

In closing, I would like to thank Ace Publishing for providing me with a free copy of this book. It was a pleasure being able to read this early as I consumed every page. Daughter of Crows is already a contender for best read of 2026. I cannot wait for the next installment in The Academy of Kindness series.