Badass nuns? Yes please! Red sister review!

Title: Red sister (Book of the Ancestor #1).

Author: Mark Lawrence.

Format: Paperback.

Publisher: HarperCollins.

Page count: 499.

Release day: April 4^th 2017.

Genre: Adult, fantasy.

Rating: 4 stars.

What is it about? (Summary from GoodReads)

I was born for killing – the gods made me to ruin.

At the Convent of Sweet Mercy young girls are raised to be killers. In a few the old bloods show, gifting talents rarely seen since the tribes beached their ships on Abeth. Sweet Mercy hones its novices’ skills to deadly effect: it takes ten years to educate a Red Sister in the ways of blade and fist.

But even the mistresses of sword and shadow don’t truly understand what they have purchased when Nona Grey is brought to their halls as a bloodstained child of eight, falsely accused of murder: guilty of worse.

Stolen from the shadow of the noose, Nona is sought by powerful enemies, and for good reason. Despite the security and isolation of the convent her secret and violent past will find her out. Beneath a dying sun that shines upon a crumbling empire, Nona Grey must come to terms with her demons and learn to become a deadly assassin if she is to survive…

My thoughts:

I love that this book has the character list at the beginning of the book! As the author says himself, often when it is put at the end, you will only see it after you finish the book.. And I definitely needed this character list at times, since some characters go by different names and have some nicknames, so that can be confusing in the beginning!

I absolutely love the writing! For some reason I always feel like adult books are hard to read..?! but not true, at least not for this one, I’m flying through the book!

I really like our main character Nona, since she doesn’t really know much of the world and just questions everything! (makes it easier for us to also learn the world haha!) And besides she is so brave, and I love that she does a lot for her friends!

I also really enjoy most of the side characters! Especially Hessa and Ara! Jula I like most of the times, but Clera really got on my nerves most of the time haha!

Most of this book is way slower than I had expected, but I didn’t mind it too much! In this way we got to learn the world, the characters and the magic! But I do hope that the sequel will be a bit more fast-paced.

Also for a book being described as Nun assassins (which they are!) I expected a bit more blood and gore to be honest?! I don’t know if it is just me, but there wasn’t so much! But maybe that is also because Nona spend most of this book in school, so maybe there will be more in the sequels, I will see!

Near the ending of the book we got even more information about the magic system, here I did have to reread some paragraph because I got quite confused. But I’m not really sure if that was because I was getting tired, or if the description was just a bit hard to follow!

The very ending really made me curious to the sequel, so I will read that right away!

Conclusion, this book was not as good as I had expected, but I still really did enjoy it and I immediately started the sequel!

Have you read this book? What did you think?