Review - Murder of Crows by Anne Bishop

Murder of Crows by Anne Bishop
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Much like the first book in this series, I started by feeling a little... off about this book. It seemed too contrived, too naive-girl-falls-for-clueless-alpha-male (that's a category, right?). But. Somewhere about halfway through this book I realized that what I was actually reading was a book about culture clash. About Us versus Them and how we get there and how very, very hard it is to back away from that. Bishop's character work is subtle here... although you're rooting along the way for the main characters, you begin to realize that the Others are clearly not in the right here, although neither are the humans who are violently targeting the terra indigene or the blood prophets. One reviewer described the romance line in this book as a slow burn but I think it's a solid description of the series as well.

I still had a few qualms with this book. For instance, Bishop hasn't fully explored how the Others' inconsistent and strangling treatment of humanity, a sentient species, is directly related to the justified resentment of humanity and thereby the uprising of humans against them (although from the tone of this book, I expect this won't be long in coming). Some descriptions are too much tell instead of show (e.g. Tess seemed permanently pissed off, so the continuing descriptions of her red, coiling hair weren't really helping me get a feeling for the dynamic tension ). And it really is a little too much naive-girl-falls-for-clueless-alpha-male at the beginning, with some campy moments that were more cringe-inducing than funny for me. However, the world-building was excellent: the introduction of the Intuits, seeing other Courtyard Others, hints of a larger conflict brewing overseas. I'm still having trouble connecting emotionally with Meg but really enjoyed the parallel internal conflicts of Simon and Monty as they try to reconcile radically different ways of life and justice. I get jumpy just thinking of Monty's daughter Lizzy and the anticipation of trouble brewing there, so Bishop has clearly succeeded in getting me to invest in this world.

Ultimately, this is a in-it-for-the-long-haul style series with steady, subtle development of themes of how we treat the Other, how conflicts escalate, and the tremendous vision and courage it takes to alter the seemingly inevitable without destroying the touchstones of identity. I'm more excited to read the third installment in this series than I've been for a new Bishop book since the publication of the last Black Jewels book. Highly recommended for fantasy fans.