Cleaning house - Grave Mercy

I've been going a little nutty at the BPL/Copley recently, so I've got to get down some notes about stuff and then get rid of the books - my bookcase & bedside table are overflowing!

A long time ago (shortly after my trip to San Diego, so mid- to late-November?) I read the first installment in the "His Fair Assassin" series, Grave Mercy (Robin LaFevers, 2012). Normally a paranormal young adult book would not exactly be up my alley, but there was an intriguing review in the New York Times, and the idea of a band of teenage girl assassins running around fifteenth-century Brittany is kind of hilarious.

The protagonist, Ismae, is a young woman who was nearly aborted by her mother and left with horrible scars and is more or less an outcast from her village and abused by her father. After she's sold in marriage to a boor who attempts to rape her, and she violently defends herself, she is packed off, through the aid of some semi-mysterious semi-strangers, to an island abbey where she is healed and then taught that she was actually fathered by the god of death (more or less), who the initiates of the abbey serve, travelling throughout the countryside killing people who need to be killed.

Ismae, as it turns out, is naturally immune to poison, so she's apprenticed to the poison-mistress, as well as being trained in martial arts, stiletto-play, and seduction (glossed over). Of course, just how you know (or the abbess knows) who needs to be killed is a bit trickier, as Ismae learns when she is sent on her first assignment, to the court of Anne of Brittany. And of course the hot-but-grumpy guy she has to both work with and spy on, Anne's b*stard half-brother, complicates things too.

There were a lot of cute, snappy little one liners and the politics of the court read believably, although I only know the very barest of outlines of the actual history, so I couldn't speak to the author's accuracy. The romantic angle was suuuuper predictable, but it didn't distract too much from the main (or other) story line. Hell, I just like titular puns :)

Overall, I'm definitely going to try to remember to read the next book in the series when it comes out in April.