Moving on to another of our finalists, today I will be reviewing Carrion Saints.
Crow can pass for human. She may come off as eccentric, but she’s good at hiding her wings. As a saint, she’s devoted her endless life to protecting humanity from other immortals: the ones they call monsters. She’s finally ready to take on the worst monster of all, a great evil sealed at the edge of civilization.
Magnolia is the worst monster of all. A villain who amuses herself by preying on valiant heroes. At first glance, she looks powerless. She looks, in fact, like a decapitated head (a very chatty one). But her magic lets her issue absolute commands to humans and immortals alike. She’s been waiting centuries for a challenger powerful enough to break the seal binding her in the wilderness. In other words, she’s been waiting centuries to magically seize control over someone like Crow.
Crow has always been patient and forgiving. Sadistic, remorseless Magnolia awakens new depths of loathing in her—a hatred of frightening intensity. And now, she’s forced to use her full power to grant Magnolia’s one heartfelt wish: to see the rest of the world. To make up for all the years she spent trapped alone with only trees for company.
What follows is an ultra slow-burn romance between true enemies. Between good and evil. Between a winged woman and a talkative severed head (who occasionally sprouts the rest of her body, just to keep things lively). They travel together across a post-apocalyptic landscape marked by strange magic and scattered human settlements. Yet the apocalypse happened a long time ago, and eons will pass before their gradually fading world dies for good.
In the meantime, these immortals are stuck with each other. Even a saint and a monstrous villain might eventually fall in love—but the path there will be dark, crooked, and sometimes surprisingly cozy.
Carrion Saints is the story of Crow, who is an immortal – one of two kinds in this world, Monsters and Saints. Crow is a Saint, and is meant to be hunting and killing Monsters. Specifically, Crow is hunting and killing four very specific Monsters, the Four Great Adversaries. She only has one more to go, and it is The Woman in the Hills, but it turns out that the Woman in the Hills has very specific powers of suggestion and command, and Crow is very much not immune.
The Woman in the Hills, AKA Magnolia, is a severed head most of the time, and all she really wants is to leave the aforementioned Hills, and she wants Crow to carry her, and Crow must do as she is bid, whether she likes it or not, so off they go, and shenanigans ensue.
This was an interesting read, to say the least. Crow and Magnolia get up to some very, very strange adventures, and meet some very strange people along the way.
This one is subtitled as a ‘Sapphic Fantasy Romance’ which I think is a bit of a misnomer. It is certainly sapphic, and ends in… what could be labelled as a romance, but this book is long, and romance doesn’t even start entering into it until well past the halfway mark. Closer to the last quarter. This is just a straight up (lol #notsorry) fantasy with a sprinkle of romancey tropes thrown in.
I love this author’s writing style. This was a very easy book to just sit down with for hours at a time. The prose easily evoked this strange world and the strange beings that inhabit it. I did like Crow, and to a lesser extent Magnolia eventually. I liked how snarky Magnolia was.
There is a connection here between this book and the other book by this author I have read (The Forest at the Heart of Her Mage) which is not necessary to understand either book, but was a nice nod anyway.
My biggest problem here was how long this one was. This book was long, y’all. Especially considering this is a self-labelled romance in which the romance doesn’t start showing up until it is nearly done. It could have been a lot shorter. There are adventures here that didn’t seem necessary to anything but giving Crow and Magnolia more time together, which didn’t really work for me in the first place because while this can be described as an ‘ultra-slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romance all it wants, it doesn’t change the fact that one of these two was not in full command of her own decisions for… most of this story. That never felt right to me.
I loosely explained the plot to my friend and she was just like ‘…yeah that is some toxic yuri right there.’ So, take that as you will.
So, honestly I’m a bit conflicted here – I liked the writing and honestly the story was good too if I thought of this not as a romance at all, and just these two learning not to hate the hell out of each other. In that scenario, I give Carrion Saints a 7.5/10 stars.
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