Review: The Sin Eater's Daughter by Melinda Salisbury

Look. At that. Cover.

★★★½

Source: e-galley from edelweiss

Publication: February 24, 2015, Scholastic

I feel like I've been waiting forever to read this book. I first saw it on Scholastic's catalog last Spring when the cover was slightly different (but still very, very pretty) and my coworker and I read the synopsis and both of us were like, "That. Sounds. Awesome." So, since Scholastic rarely, for some reason, sends actual galleys to our store, I've been checking Edelweiss for the DRC regularly for the past — oh, 9 months? And then our rep, who hates fantasy, posted a glowing review, and my hands got even more grabby, but STILL NO GALLEY.

And then, finally, a month before the book is released, it was there.

And then my Nook stopped working.

And then I got scammed on eBay trying to buy a Kindle to replace it.

I did not get to read the book until I went to Best Buy on Super Bowl Sunday to buy a Kindle FULL PRICE (I am defeated and ashamed). I had to deal with a salesman for this book, you guys.

Was it worth it?

Yes, I would say that it was. Probably I could have waited until the book was out to read it, because I was always planning to buy it either way (dat cover), but I'm glad I read it early. Because now I can actually sell it.

Basically, what the book is about is this: Twylla is the Sin Eater's Daughter — her mother is a giant woman who eats food off of caskets to wash the dead of their sins. Twylla grew up knowing that this would be her fate eventually; when her mother died, she was to become the next Sin Eater. She did not want to be a Sin Eater.

Then, the royal family requests her mother's services and end up taking Twylla away to be Daunen Embodied. Without getting into the mythological details, that means that after drinking a concoction of poison and her own blood, her skin can poison other people with a single touch. She is to be the executioner for traitors until she marries the prince, Merek, and becomes queen.

[cue the twist] But then she meets Lief, her new guard who shows her that all is not as it seems, and she must decide her fate.

Bum bum BUUMMMMMM

My favorite thing about this book was the mythology and world-building. I'd never heard of Sin Eating before, and it does not sound pleasant, but I totally believed that it would be something certain religions or cultures would practice. I believed the myth of Daunen Embodied and the gods who created her. There is no other YA fantasy that achieves quite this level of myth-weaving and directly relates it to the main character. I mean, Twylla's relationship to her religion was kind of the driving factor of the whole plot, and it was done very well. The first-person narration allows the reader to suspend disbelief until the very moment Twylla stops doing it herself.

And there wasn't only mythology, either. There were fairy tales so entwined in reality that real people would die for mentioning them. As a sucker for symbolism and all that AP English stuff, I really appreciated the symbolism of all of this, the line between tale and reality, smashed in our faces like delicious pie when Twylla goes to a "House of Glass" (house of mirrors, fun house) with Merek and he thinks the mirrors show the exact truth at all times. She can see that he's wrong, because there is someone in the room whose position hides him from all the mirrors but the one behind Merek— so Merek can't see him, but Twylla can. In her life nobody has ever told her the whole truth, but now she's the one looking out for the lies.

The writing was enough to keep me reading, if not super heavy on style or lyricism. I expected more on that front, but it was unique enough to the story that it didn't feel anachronistic or tone deaf (like, say, Snow Like Ashes).

My main gripe about the book is that Twylla does not get to act much. She spends the whole book reacting to things other people tell her and do to her. Her relationship with Lief didn't convince me that it had to be; it seemed more of a convenience relationship than anything. She fell in love with him in much the same way that Juliette Ferrars fell in love with Adam Kent: because he was the first male around her age to ever be nice to her or take an interest in her. Maybe this was on purpose, because of Big Plot Twist At End, but it made a good portion of the book feel too melodramatic and overdone. If you don't buy into a love story, you can't relish its drama.

There was also the fact that Twylla's emotional stakes rested so much on this love story that she completely forgot about her original emotional stakes: her sister. She only agreed to everything the queen asked because her sister would pay if she didn't, but then she stopped thinking about her sister altogether once she fell in love with Lief (aside from telling him stories about her childhood). No me gusta.

That said, her relationship with Merek interested me a lot. It reminded me a bit of Celaena and Dorian from Throne of Glass, except that for a part of the book you're not sure about Merek's motives. He could be totally evil or totally good, and I liked that ambiguity while it lasted. You don't even have to give me a romance on this one, because I so enjoy dudes respecting ladies after they've been "friendzoned." Or even without any romantic context whatsoever.

Aside from a couple of things that were mentioned and then never addressed again (e.g. Twylla's brothers), I thought the plot was solid and built well into the next book, though I'm wondering if it's going to be more of a companion than a sequel. We'll see.

Overall a very different, compelling fantasy world with somewhat lackluster characters who have a lot of potential.