Life has never been easy for Karys. From her impoverished childhood in a remote fishing village to her marginal life in the capital of a chaotic former empire, Karys has always had to do things she never wanted just to stay alive a little longer. We meet her on yet another one of those reluctant jobs in the opening pages of Asunder, Kerstin Hall’s devastating novel. This job will change her life, just like so many of the hard choices she’s made in the past. The difference between those choices and this job is that, finally, Karys has found something more important than merely surviving.
There’s a learning curve to Asunder that I very much appreciated it. It’s so hard to find truly original works of fantasy. So I drank up the details about the lost, monstrous Bhatumas that created miracles that were probably not worth the human costs. The Ephirites, the new supernatural forces, aren’t much better to my way of thinking. The Ephirites are the source of Karys’s ability to conjure and speak to the dead. As a deathspeaker who isn’t beholden to the Ephirite cult of New Favour, Karys is sought after by people who want answers that they don’t want the government to know about. It doesn’t pay well, but it’s enough. Her latest job is another in a long line of jobs from the local crime lord, Marishka: she has to figure out what happened to Marishka’s smugglers. They disappeared without a sign on a beach that is usually safe enough for a little criminal activity. It doesn’t take much time for Karys to figure out what killed the men—what takes longer is devining where the creatures came from and who controls them. There’s also a complication in the form of a foreign diplomat, the only survivor of a shipwreck. The survivor, Ferain, promises Karys a life-changing amount of money if she can get him home—they just have to get past the deadly beasts on the beach. See what I mean about a learning curve?
It’s not just the fantastic world Hall created that had me hooked. It’s not even just the plot, and I’m a sucker for a great plot like the one in Asunder that ramps up tension while it twists and turns in unexpected ways. We get to watch Karys, Ferain, and a scholar so fascinated by our protagonist’s dilemma that she insists on accompanying Karys all the way to Ferain’s home nation run for their lives, hounded by Ephirite minions and troubled by greedy criminals looking for profit no matter who gets caught in their webs. What really, really made me fall for this book was the characters. Karys is a delightfully prickly and pragmatic character, while Ferain is someone who keeps putting himself between other and danger. I adore watching a prickly character slowly become vulnerable to trust and love over the course of a novel.
Asunder was so enthralling and so moving that, at one point, I had to deliberately stop reading it too late on weeknights because I knew the book would wreck me. It absolutely did, and in the best way. Asunder was so good that I’m now going to bully my bookish friends into reading it. Fellow readers, this book will wring you out and leave you with a burning hope that love will find a way to win against impossible odds.