Daughter of Crows

Hardcover, 416 pages

Published April 14, 2026 by Penguin Publishing Group.

ISBN:: 978-0-593-81894-7
ASIN:: 0593818946
Goodreads:: 238767000

The survivor of a brutal academy must exhume her own past in the first book in a new series from the international bestselling author of the Library Trilogy and the Broken Empire series.

Set a thief to catch a thief. Set a monster to punish monsters.

The Academy of Kindness exists to create agents of retribution, cast in the image of the Furies—known as the kindly ones—against whom even the gods hesitate to stand. Each year a hundred girls are sold to the Academy. Ten years later only three will emerge.

The Academy’s halls run with blood. The few that survive its decade-long nightmare have been forged on the sands of the Wound Garden. They have learned ancient secrets amid the necrotic fumes of the Bone Garden. They leave its gates as avatars of vengeance, bound to uphold the oldest of laws.

Only the most desperate …

The survivor of a brutal academy must exhume her own past in the first book in a new series from the international bestselling author of the Library Trilogy and the Broken Empire series.

Set a thief to catch a thief. Set a monster to punish monsters.

The Academy of Kindness exists to create agents of retribution, cast in the image of the Furies—known as the kindly ones—against whom even the gods hesitate to stand. Each year a hundred girls are sold to the Academy. Ten years later only three will emerge.

The Academy’s halls run with blood. The few that survive its decade-long nightmare have been forged on the sands of the Wound Garden. They have learned ancient secrets amid the necrotic fumes of the Bone Garden. They leave its gates as avatars of vengeance, bound to uphold the oldest of laws.

Only the most desperate would sell their child to the Kindnesses. But Rue … she sold herself. And now, a lifetime later, a long and bloody lifetime later, just as she has discovered peace, war has been brought to an old woman’s doorstep.

That was a mistake.

2 editions

enne📚 reviewed Daughter of Crows by Mark Lawrence (The Academy of Kindness, #1)

Daughter of Crows

4 stars

I have such mixed feelings about Daughter of Crows. It's a GRIMDARK (imagine a heavy metal font and growly voice saying this) fantasy story that centers around a school for assassins.

This book is driven by carefully deployed character reveals. It's told from the perspectives of the aging woman Rue (hiding her assassin past), the childhood of Eldest (in a gaslighting abusive childhood manor), and the violent assassin academy via Bek (100 girls enter! three leave!). It's not clear to the reader who all these perspectives are, or if they're the same person, or how they might be connected. This uncertainty gives the author space for surprises and concealing information and connections from the reader until the right moment. It's nothing I haven't seen before, but I think it's quite effective.

The shifting perspectives also help with the pacing. Maybe I'm a bit exhausted by magical school stories, …

I have such mixed feelings about Daughter of Crows. It's a GRIMDARK (imagine a heavy metal font and growly voice saying this) fantasy story that centers around a school for assassins.

This book is driven by carefully deployed character reveals. It's told from the perspectives of the aging woman Rue (hiding her assassin past), the childhood of Eldest (in a gaslighting abusive childhood manor), and the violent assassin academy via Bek (100 girls enter! three leave!). It's not clear to the reader who all these perspectives are, or if they're the same person, or how they might be connected. This uncertainty gives the author space for surprises and concealing information and connections from the reader until the right moment. It's nothing I haven't seen before, but I think it's quite effective.

The shifting perspectives also help with the pacing. Maybe I'm a bit exhausted by magical school stories, and over the course of five years of assassin school, we only see a couple of scenes per year, rather than this just being a school-driven story. Moreover, the other perspectives often provide immediate context for the next chapter of a different perspective, making me more invested in the different story arcs.

On the negative side, the worldbuilding is quite weird. Suffice it to say that all of humanity has been relegated (or chased?) to the two islands of Gog and Magog, and the rest of the world is unknown. In a religious sense both the furies and Morrigan exist, literally. There are also mentions of Yggdrasil and Christ and Saraswati. It's very big on the triple goddess idea. Oh yeah, there is also an afterlife ferryman.

There is a part of me that says that if you're going to riff on preexisting myth and stories, then you should pick one and do it well. This hodgepodge of stories feels quite weak. I think the best you can hope for is that this is some alternate/future/virtual world where there is some reveal or reasoning why all of this fits together. Overall, I find myself more skeptical than intrigued.

The other thing I think makes this book weaker is the existence of necromancy. Sure, there's a good moment early. However, despite loads of people dying in this book, the main character literally dies several times and is sometimes even chased into the afterlife by other characters. It feels a little too much like protagonist plot armor.

I think this all makes it tough to recommend, even if there are bits I really enjoyed.