“Halfheart” by Linden A. Lewis

Linden Lewis had one of my favorite debuts (both as a first novel and a first trilogy) in The First Sister, so I was EXTREMELY excited when I learned she was working on a fantasy standalone. My hype was justified.

That being said: I’ve been trying to write this review for at least a week. Halfheart provoked a ton of strong emotions in me, and I have completely failed to find the words to express them. So please just trust me that the book is an easy 5 stars.

Mordrena Halfheart is a mercenary, and a former dedicant of the goddess the Victory. But there’s a problem: the War, the god who has been consuming the other gods and goddesses of the pantheon, including the Victory, is on his way towards the island where Mordrena has been living with the clear intent of conquering it and consuming the resident goddess, the Moon. 

And there is a secondary protagonist as well: a young child whose village was destroyed, but she herself was rescued by a mage who takes her to the camp of the War. There she finds both shelter and a new family, but there is a great deal about her circumstances which she does not begin to understand.

This is a book about grief more than anything else. The young child is in shock from the death of her mother, and terrified to trust that anyone else she comes to care about will be lost in turn. Mordrena grieves over her dead goddess, the betrayal of her companions, and above all her younger sister are what drives the story. Early in the story she learns what she had always suspected - that her surrogate father had betrayed the Victory to the War, and her former lover was in some way bound to the War as well. So obviously the grief she’s been feeling for decades comes back to the fore.

Last point I want to mention: Lewis returns to the trick she pulled in the First Sister books of playing with the narrator. It made for some fantastic twists in that trilogy to realize who was talking, and it works just as well here.