Review: A Sword of Bronze and Ashes by Anna Smith Spark

Blurb:

Readers of Shauna Lawless and Thilde Kold Holdt will love this Celtic-inflected adventure by critically acclaimed, grimdark epic fantasy novelist, Anna Smith Spark.

A Sword of Bronze and Ashes combines the fierce beauty of Celtic myth with grimdark battle violence. It's a lyrical, folk horror high fantasy.

Kanda has a good life until shadows from her past return threatening everything she loves. And Kanda, like any parent, has things in her past she does not want her children to know. Red war is pursued by an ancient evil, Kanda must call upon all her strength to protect her family. But how can she keep her children safe, if they want to stand as warriors beside her when the light fades and darkness rises?

Review:

A Sword of Bronze and Ashes is a novel that asks the age old question: what if John Wick was a happily married mother in a folkish grimdark novel? 

Anna Smith Spark, the Queen of Grimdark and the Empress of Fabulous prose, has written another unique, beautiful, gripping, darker than black book. Bronze and Ashes centers on Kanda, a farmer, wife, and mother of three, living a rote life after escaping her past of a glorious warrior and leader of the righteous, legendary group called The Six. Dark figures from her former life return, forcing Kanda and her family to flee. 

What follows is a tense, fraught novel, one where Kanda has to keep her family safe while also being the mom. That involves kissing skinned knees, lying about circumstances, and answering a neverending onslaught of questions, while also fighting demonic shadows and dread inspiring nightmares, all while never receiving a single "thank you". The hardships they endure are intermittently laced with stories of her past, battles won and lost, horrors felled and horrors created. 

The main strength of the book, as with her other works, is Spark's prose. If you've never read her work, you're doing yourself a disservice. It's unlike any others, evocative and gripping and poetic and tragic and visceral. Utterly entrancing stuff, and she puts it on full display in this work. 

Spark uses the prose to deliver some absolutely gutpunching segments, as well as using it to capture how it feels as a mom trying to keep her family unbroken in a horrible world. If a weaker author wrote this book, it would fall flat on its face, but due to the strength of her writing, it's an oddly claustrophobic, glorious novel. 

Despite the amount of praise I have for this book, I'd be very selective about how I'd recommend it to. Not only is it, at times, horrifically fucked up, it’s also folk inspired, and the laws of the land and the plot reflect that. Dr. John Maruo wrote a recommended reading order for Spark's work, and Bronze and Ashes is at the bottom. That's not to say it's a bad book, because by all means, it's a very good one, but only certain people will love it. 

If you're looking for concrete worldbuilding and a hard magic system, look elsewhere. If you're a parent looking to escape for an hour from the mundanities of the world and the needs of children, look elsewhere. If you're someone looking for an upbeat novel about a man killing and being loved for it, look elsewhere.

But, if you're someone who likes your prose purple and your world bleak, someone who likes being devastated by passages of beautiful writing, someone wanting to feel like an unthanked and overworked mother, or just someone looking to *feel*, this is for you. 

P.s. Anna if you're reading this please get my girl Kanda some Gas-X