This honestly could have used some spicing up.

80. Star Eater – Kerstin Hall

I am not sure exactly how cannibal nuns can be so boring. I generally like the idea of someone breaking out of a stringent system like the sisters here, but it is starting to become more and more uninteresting to me when you’ve got to be “special” to do it. It’s not so much breaking the order if you were born into the order to change it, connected to the one they worship, the Star Eater replacement for any other deity who might have nuns.

Elfreda’s not part of the active resistance initially or the not-internal one anyway, she has to eat pieces of her undead but catatonic mom to keep up her “lace” magic, she knows their society is running out of food and is trying to help with that agriculturally (which to me got short shrift, her actual interests might have helped her be more than a special vessel and also, have they thought about soylent green…). She seems like she wants to not be a part of the order, but wants to keep the power and the knowledge of how things work that being part of the order affords her, so being a spy works in that direction.

The building of the world is interesting to some extent, but all of it, the characters, the world, felt very surface to me. There are quite a few characters, but during the story it was hard to remember who the sisters were, although there was a lot about their hierarchy. It seemed like no one was allowed to truly have depth because the author had to spend a lot of time on something, but I can’t entirely tell you what that something is.

 

Unlike in this book, the rumors of guinea pigs eating each other aren’t true. Guinea pigs are herbivores through and through and Mortemer finds these rumors tiring.