Mortal Heart (His Fair Assassin)

Annith's story was bound to be less of a pulse-pounding adventure than Ismae and Sybella's. When introduced in the first book, she immediately comes off as the kinder more contemplative soul. But I think there was a reason why it took me nearly five years to get around to the third book in this series. Just from its premise alone, I felt like this story was going to be a harder task for LaFevers. A looser, more meandering plot is not uncommon for final installments in trilogies or quadrilogies. They can be done, done well (see [b:The Final Descent 13260751 The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist, #4) Rick Yancey https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1357871543s/13260751.jpg 55490454]), and not so well (see [b:Mockingjay 7260188 Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3) Suzanne Collins https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1358275419s/7260188.jpg 8812783]). This unfortunately falls into the latter category. Sheltered in the convent of Saint Mortain all her life, Annith is good at listening at doors. This little habit unveils something startling - that she has been chosen to be the seer for the convent, meaning she will never leave its walls. Confused and deeply disappointed, she sets out on her own to figure out her destiny. She rides with grim reapers, she hunts alongside an army of female soldiers, and discovers the hard truth about her identity and her past. Basically, she falls into a series of experiences that feel mostly like meandering episodes that fail to really connect to each other properly. Like Ismae and Sybella, she gets a broody, dark love interest but their romance seems lazily done. And there is so much time spent getting from here to there, taking us through things step by step for no other reason than this is the pace of this book - plodding, slow and boring.What I find most fascinating about this book is its discussions of faith. If the themes of the previous books were of mercy and justice, then faith and unconditional love is at the core of this installment. We get into some deeper emotional and spiritual space with someone who has a deep love for her god, and how that bumps up against those that follow Him but don't feel the same way. Annith is also coming to terms with the fact that faith is not the same thing as the clergy and institution that has been organized around it. Even in service of a worthy god, people make terrible mistakes, and whole institutions can be corrupted by someone's desire to protect themselves (this I feel like is an important lesson to heed right now). And gods make mistakes too.However, while Annith had a lot of potential, I think something was missed by not going deeper with spiritual tone of this book. As I've said before in my review for The Kingdom of Gods, writing about gods is hard. You have to be ready to get down and dirty with eternity. There are little bits of that, but not enough. And let's be real here - Annith has sex with a god. She falls in love with a god. And its some of the most disappointing chemistry in the entire series. Mortain ain't Nahadoth, I'm sorry. I'm ok with Annith not being this vengeful warrior like Ismae and Sybella, but that doesn't mean she should spend all her time sitting by someone's bedside or waiting to speak. I get the direction LaFevers was going for, and I also know from listening to Sarah Enni's podcast that writing this book was a struggle for her after being badly triggered by writing Sybella's story in Dark Triumph. And I think it could have been possible to apply the same grit and passion that's in the previous installments in a different way here, but it just didn't happen.