Book Review: House of Ravens

Title: House of Ravens

Author: Jenny Sandiford

Date: 2023

Publisher: Velikor

ISBN: 978-0-6854449-3-3

Quote: "Getting into his father's good books was everything."

There has been an active campaign to encourage writers to write more stories of dysfunctional families and what's been explained as "dark academia," along with "Southern Gothic," to make family, education, and heritage seem like bad things. No points for guessing what other bad ideas lurk where that one came from. 

However, knowing about this campaign makes it possible to enjoy the fantasies of all that real families, schools, and farms are not. 

In the first volume of a series that's definitely written for and about adults, the protagonist, Torin, is a teenager being trained for a career as an assassin. His father is brutal and mean. His mother is dead; Torin believes the patriarch of a rival family killed her. Oh, by the way, although this all seems to be taking place in modern England with flush toilets and blazer jackets and all, the rival crime families have contrasting magical powers. Torin's family, the Dumonts of the House of Ravens, are killers. Torin's father teaches all his assassins-to-be how to use a "sleeping beauty spell" to put people into deep, possibly permanent sleep, which involves among other things drawing a triangle of spirals. When Torin tries it, his hand and mind slip, he draws a crooked backward Z, and anyone his hand or mind is touching dies. 

This is all the effect of the ancient Babylonian gods being alive, as forces of nature and magic, int his alternate world. 

I didn't really enjoy visiting this alternate world. Some people do. Sandiford's world is just on the borderline of dystopian. If you enjoy speculative fiction with a focus on the question of how someone brought up in an amoral religion thinks about moral matters, you'll want to collect the rest of Torin's adventures.