Sharp as a Razor

There’s an element of the formulaic in Veronica Roth’s writing: choose a context, find the structural misfit and you have your protagonist. That protagonist then undergoes an adventure which brings into question the entire structure of their society or constellation of societies. It sounds like a lot of YA and SF, but there is a real feeling of similarity between her famous Divergent series and her new Curse Bearer series, despite the fact that she’s now talking about monsters from Slavic folklore, rather than human factions.

To Clutch a Razor
By Veronica Roth
Macmillan, Tor; 240 pages

The feeling, however, is less deja vu and more like a new album from a favorite band with the release of Roth’s To Clutch a Razor, the second instalment in Curse Bearer. In When Among Crows Dymitr discovered that he has more in common with the “monsters” that he finds in Chicago and is supposed to hate, than with his tight-knit clan of cultish, God-obsessed, monster-killers. He even falls in love with Ala, a zmora, a form of monster that feeds on people’s fear. Of course “feeding on fear” sounds terrible but it sounds less monstrous to say that her family owns a horror movie theater.

In Razor, Dymitr returns home to the Holy Order in Europe, to see his beloved sister, steal a vital, powerful book, and maybe kill his grandmother who brought him up with the love and trust his parents never could. You can see how the emotional stakes are ramped up for this second book in the series. Every action that he plans has him pitting love against love: belonging against belonging.

Ala is constantly under the shadow of the curse that threatens her health. Dymitr is constantly on a knife edge between accidentally endangering his loved ones and deliberately killing other ones. Magic is a form of spiritual debt — knights of the Holy Order literally split their souls to power their swords — and Dymitr is always borrowing from one powerful being to repay another. He starts off the book deep in debt to Baba Yaga and remains constantly off-balance emotionally, spiritually, and supernaturally. As a result, he careens through an otherwise extremely set-piece plot pulling the reader with him.

Not least because of his propensity for silence, Niko — the part-human, part-owl strzygon who feeds on anger — is a surprisingly supple tool for Roth to use to connect relationships. As well as Dymitr who carries his pain on his sleeve, both Niko and Ala hold their own traumas, moral queries, and capacities for both violence and empathy. The triangular relationships are messy, real, and distracting from the clunky plotline. Roth enjoys showing that love doesn’t erase pain; duty demands sacrifice; and family is chaos.

The entire structure of the manichean opposition of the Holy Order to the smorgasbord of Slavic folklore creatures is surely under threat from the in-love couple and the live-and-let-live families on either side but that resolution or challenge we will surely encounter further along the series. For readers drawn to dark folklore, morally gray heroes, and stories that probe what we owe to blood — and what we owe ourselves — this is a fun, suspenseful, and surprisingly satisfying read.