Review: Year of the Reaper

Year of the Reaper by Makiia Lucier
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Year of the Reaper by Makiia Lucier surrounded me in this nagging sense of foreboding from the start, as though entering into a valley shrouded in mist where the past hangs on everything. I'd picked it up expecting to find a combination of history and subtle fantasy, and it led me through a world devastated by war and plague, one that was raw and real in a way that not many books are.

The novel follows Lord Cas, thought dead after imprisonment and the grasp of the plague, back to his home kingdom after its transformation. Ghosts of the deceased follow him, literally, and an unseen threat at court draws him into allegiances and lies which strain tenuous peaces. No spoilers, but a tale of peeling away the truths at the hard edges of survival.

What stands out best is Lucier's understated writing, providing a backdrop in which empty roads and deserted villages speak for themselves without melodrama. The atmosphere builds this unspoken fear, perhaps disrupted by moments of acerbic wit that left me agog, making characters feel tangible and human. Cas, specifically, comes into his own in ways that recall the grounded explorations of James Islington's The Licanius Trilogy, his traumas informing his decisions without turning him into some inaccessible hero. I enjoyed the pace too, swift but subtle, twists heaping up like storm clouds, each one owed its reveal. The supernatural insinuates itself into the frame in subtle ways, no grand spectres, but enough to augment the human conflict.

It's all tied together in themes, which leave one to wonder how loss reshapes us, or doesn't. It ponders, gently, at the weight of not releasing happiness when all else is so fleeting, and whether strength isn't about taking away scars but moving on with them. Justice, too, in a fractured world, where love can bind or break, is philosophical without being preachy, reminding me of V.E. Schwab's musings in A Darker Shade of Magic, although Lucier grounds it on hardness after disaster.

One minor nit: some of the plot threads are too neatly resolved, maybe too pleasantly for the bleak tone of the tale, but it hardly took away from my enjoyment. The quick-witted banter, replete with sarcasm, had me smiling through dry one-liners in tight situations, friends weathering storms together that rang true.

I'd highly suggest this to anyone starved for rich world-building with compelling tension and complex characters, especially Brandon Sanderson enthusiasts of rich but unique stakes. It haunts, forcing us to examine our own echoes from the past, and earns its five stars.

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