Review of Daughter of Crows by Mark Lawrence
Title: Daughter of Crows
Author: Mark Lawrence
Genre: Fantasy, Dark Academia, Dark Fantasy
Year Published: 2026
My Rating: 4.5/5
Blurb:
The survivor of a brutal academy must exhume her own past in the first book in a new series from the international bestselling author of the Library Trilogy and the Broken Empire series.
Set a thief to catch a thief. Set a monster to punish monsters.
The Academy of Kindness exists to create agents of retribution, cast in the image of the Furies—known as the kindly ones—against whom even the gods hesitate to stand. Each year a hundred girls are sold to the Academy. Ten years later only three will emerge.
The Academy’s halls run with blood. The few that survive its decade-long nightmare have been forged on the sands of the Wound Garden. They have learned ancient secrets amid the necrotic fumes of the Bone Garden. They leave its gates as avatars of vengeance, bound to uphold the oldest of laws.
Only the most desperate would sell their child to the Kindnesses. But Rue … she sold herself. And now, a lifetime later, a long and bloody lifetime later, just as she has discovered peace, war has been brought to an old woman’s doorstep.
Review
I can't add half stars in Net Galley, but this was a 4.5*!
Thank you to Mark Lawrence, Harper Voyager, and NetGalley for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
Daughter of Crows is a horrifically dark and haunting tale that show us the horrors of both the divine and the earthly; the cost of magic and humanity's free will.
In this world, female children are sold to Academy of Kindness where they are set upon a ruthless series of trials in a five-year period, where only three emerge with their lives and becoming Kindnesses themselves. Kindnesses are arbiters of justice, demanding blood or money whenever immoral acts are carried out. The hypocrisy of doling out justice but systematically committing mass injustice to underprivileged girls through mass femicide every year is a brilliant commentary on real-life institutions and paragons of justice and 'goodness'.
The novel opens up by introducing us to the main character: the elderly Rue - or rather, for the first few chapters, Molly Plight. The narrative is woven through multiple POVs in multiple timelines which confused me for the first few chapters, but I soon found it a masterful use of a literary device, whilst encouraging a re-read. Although the reader does not understand Rue and her motivations at the start of the novel, through these shifting timelines we slowly begin to empathise with her and realise why she is the way that she is; the interwoven timelines are a masterpiece in showing how our pasts haunt us and shape who we are today.
I preferred the POVs of the past but still enjoyed the ones in the future as the importance of sisterhood and revenge was mirrored in both timelines, and we can understand more about the future after learning about the past.
I thoroughly enjoyed Rue's character; she is an objectively terrible person but throughout the novel I found myself rooting for her. I also loved how she was an older woman with weaknesses, making a well-needed change from typical fantasy protagonists. She is a shining example of how survival can come at the cost of kindness and how one's sense of identity is never clear-cut.
The world-building was a masterclass in how to create a grimdark setting; focusing on kindness and cruelty, life and death, religion and the secular and the grey, liminal spaces in-between. Whilst the future POVs were anything but happy, the past felt like a bleak and horrifying nightmare. The mansion scenes in particular were harrowing and the fear the children felt in the face of the eldritch nature of Mother and Father was palpable. Furthermore, in the world of Daughter of Crows where kindness is swiftly stamped out due to it usually being antithetical to survival, easily made the setting feel sombre and oppressive. However, this made the small acts of love and sisterhood truly shine. My only critique of the setting was that I was unsure if the world was a dystopian Earth or another world with similarities to our own as the deities and folklore mentioned were our own. The Morrigan and the Furies (though here they were attributed to the same deity), Gog and Magog and even Christ Himself were all mentioned by name. Either way, it hints at religious perennialism - where all religions share a universal truth.
My only other complaint is that the ending felt abrupt; almost like the author wanted to add the possibility of a sequel at the end of writing the novel. However, I am glad if I get to see more of Rue, and maybe my questions about deities and the world itself will be answered!