Sarah Ahiers’ debut novel, Assassin’s Heart, features a girl who belongs to a culture where murder is worship – provided it follows the correct procedures. Lea Saldana is seventeen years old and already practiced at killing people in service of her death goddess, Safraella. She belongs to the Saldana family, one of nine families in Lovero who are assassins for hire. They often kill people who most would say “deserve” it, but the reasons don’t actually matter in Lovero: as long as the price is paid, the assassins will do the job.
The premise of this one is similar to Robin LaFevers His Fair Assassin, but it is much more difficult for me to swallow. The morality of the characters is pretty foreign to most of our societies, I would say. Even in the His Fair Assassin books, the murders that the girls commit are ostensibly ordered by their god and therefore just. In Lea’s world, all that is required is money. It is the act of killing, not killing for the right reasons, that is the worship. Mitigating the harshness of this somewhat is the belief by Loverans that people killed as worship of Safraella will be reincarnated by her later. Therefore, death is not really permanent, though reborn people will have no memory of prior lives.
When Lea’s family is killed by the Da Vias, one of the Saldanas’ rival families (the families mostly kill each other too, forming and dissolving alliances repeatedly), Lea goes on the run to another country and formulates a plan for revenge. She seeks out a long-banished uncle who did something unspeakable (at least according to the Saldanas) and teams up with another young assassin-in-training, Les, both of whom assist her to different degrees.
The religion of the book is messy, though certainly unique. And the fact that it’s messy isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since most of humanity’s religions are pretty messy in real life too. It’s one of those religions in fantasy books where it seems like it may just be a set of beliefs the characters hold and then morphs into the kind where the gods and goddesses actually appear on the page and do what the characters believe they can do. It’s interesting and nuanced in some ways.
But.
Ahiers never got me to fully suspend my disbelief – that such a powerful culture would exist where this kind of thing was de rigeur and generally accepted. Real people certainly use religion to justify all sorts of terrible things, including murder, but I would say such people are generally fringe and condemned by the majority of believers. Of course, the fact that the culture Lea belongs to is not a copy of a real one can be argued as a positive, and Ahiers does provide a counterpoint in the culture of the country Lea escapes to, where her form of worship is considered barbarous. But I just never bought into it, and I think a lot of teens will have a hard time with it too.
That said, this book does have a lot going for it. The premise, while not perfect, is an engaging one. It’s a revenge story with a lot of action, a little romance, and a few twists. Ahiers’ writing is solid throughout, and while I had a hard time buying into the idea on the whole, I did believe that Lea’s motivations were real, and I didn’t have a hard time rooting for her, despite her contradictions (at one point in the story, someone points out to her that the murder of her family was also an act of worship, and shouldn’t be OK with that considering her own beliefs?). This is an interesting, imperfect book that may find a divided readership.
Book borrowed from my local library.