Red Sister – Mark Lawrence

Excellent fantasy with a science-fiction backstory. Nona is brought to the Convent of Sweet Mercy, from the gallows, as a young girl, and is enrolled as a student. Many of the convent’s students become Holy Sisters of The Ancestor. Or they become fighters or assassins or mages.

Teaching mages is made easier at the convent by its proximity to a surviving reactor from one of the near-mythic ships that brought humanity to Abeth millenia earlier, though mages still have to have inherited the innate ability. Anyone can become a fighter but, here too, it helps to have inherited the right abilities. Abeth was settled by four races, each with its own special trait, but after 50 (?) millenia of interbreeding and genetic drift, those traits have become rare. People who can manifest two of these traits are vanishingly rare. There is a popular prophecy of questionable provenance to the effect that the world will be saved (it does need saving) by a Chosen One who can manifest all four. While we do not definitively see a character who manifests all four traits, the convent has three students we suspect might. Nona is one of them, of course.

Remember the gallows? At the start of the book, Nona has injured a child molester from a powerful family, and the family is in the habit of making embarrassments go away. This habit drives much of the plot, as the family throws implausibly-disproportionate resources into attacks on Nona. Nona surviving the attacks provides many of the best scenes in the book, as she displays special abilities and manifests new ones.

So, on the positive side, engaging protagonist, interesting setting that is well-integrated with the story, good supporting characters, a well-done school story, intimations of a bigger story outside the school, good writing that kept the pages turning. The book is weakened by the arbitrariness of the plot, including a tendency for things to work out too neatly for the villains. It also suffers from the superpowered-character problem: There is no threat the protagonist can’t overcome, so long as the author makes her powers sufficient to the moment.