Review: Gravemaidens by Kelly Coon

Gravemaidens by Kelly Coon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This review is full of spoilers. Read at your own risk.

The idea of this book came out better than the finished product, I guess. Three young maidens are chosen to accompany the dying Lugal (king? emperor? same diff) to the netherworld as his brides. Kammani, the main character, is dismayed when her sister Nanaea is chosen as one of those maidens, even though Nanaea is positively gloating and excited about it. Kammani decides she has to heal the Lugal so that her sister doesn't have to die. This is a noble goal, but if Kammani were honest with herself, it really has nothing to do with her sister and everything to do with herself, and if she'd just listen to her sister instead of dislocating a shoulder patting herself on the back for all her sacrificing, maybe no one would have ended up in a tomb. A plot that only gets set into motion because of the main character's idiocy really doesn't float my boat.

Kammani is one of the most infuriating main characters I've ever read. She has a savior complex and will not accept help from anyone else. She's madly in love with Dagan but won't admit it because she doesn't want to be a wife and mother, because apparently you aren't allowed to be a wife and mother and still be a healer, even though Dagan's mother is a wife and mother and is perfectly capable of healing people too. Dagan is like a puppy around her, following her around with his tail wagging like she'll eventually turn around and acknowledge that she's really rather fond of him and of course she'll marry him... And after Kammani's mother dies (before the events of this book, even though the actual event is written out in detail later in the book) apparently Kammani takes her comment of "You're the only one" as meaning she's the only person in the entire world who could ever possibly help her family and no one else on the planet is as good at that or as self-sacrificing about it as she is. I wanted to smack her upside the head before she even got to the palace.

She is also incredibly gullible. Dagan makes an off-hand comment about how is she sure the Nin (the princess) isn't the one poisoning the Lugal, and suddenly she's all gung-ho that the Nin is the one to blame and she goes off on a crazy single-minded quest to accuse this woman in public. Never mind that Uruku and Gudanna are horrible villains and very obviously hate her guts. Never mind that the person who ordered her thrown out of the window didn't *actually* sound like the Nin. Nope, let's go after the girl whose father is dying and who has shown nothing but eagerness for him to be healed, just because one time she looked like she was enjoying herself at a festival.

And all of this is nothing compared to Kammani's hare-brained plan, hatched in about thirty seconds after she escapes the palace, to sneak back into the palace and onto a platform in front of hundreds of people to accuse the Nin with something she found in her chambers, as if her word and the word of a soldier would prove a damn thing! And on top of that, the Lugal dies anyway right in front of everyone.

Then we get to see her and the other three girls thrown into the tomb anyway. Some weird-ass scene with the Boatman happens, everyone gets poisoned, Kammani tries to save them all, yadda yadda, she wakes up safe at Dagan's farm and now like 10 people get to go into hiding in a giant caravan, as if no one would notice a huge cavalcade of people leaving the city in broad daylight on stolen horses and oh they all just happen to be fugitives.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me the opportunity to read this book. I wish I had enjoyed it more and was less annoyed by the MC and her terrible ideas. This just did not work for me.

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