Miscellaneous Stones (Lanie) is the youngest member of the Stones family, which has long served Liriat's ruling family as executioners and assassins. Lanie, however, has an allergy to any sort of unnatural physical harm, as sympathy wounds appear on her any time she's near someone getting stabbed, poisoned, beaten senseless with fists, etc. Makes it a bit hard for her to spend any time with her family (which makes Wednesday Adams seem like a cuddly lovable puppy), and to her psychopathic sister Nita, Lanie is an excellent target for bullying. Thankfully, Lanie is also a necromancer, so she's able to spend her time instead with ghosts, revenants (like the Stones family's longtime servant, Goody), and all the skeleton creatures she can animate. But when Nita comes home from schooling abroad with a shapeshifting man in her thrall and a royal assignment to murder the wizards of a rival country, Lanie finds herself spending more time than she'd like with Nita, Nita's now-husband Mak, and her niece Datura, constantly fearful that Nita's work and violent inclinations will bring on Lanie's demise and the destruction of everything their family built.
This was an enjoyable read, though my summary above only really hits on a small bit of the plot. A blurb on the back notes "every time I thought I knew what kind of book it was, it changed," and really, I couldn't agree more. Cooney obviously had a lot of really excellent ideas for worldbuilding and characters, but at times, I felt like this could have been expanded into a few books that gave more insight into those characters and places instead of cramming them all into one place. It's particularly perplexing, as this is intended to be a series, so some of those elements certainly could have waited until later on. That said, I loved the idea of a gentle, bookish, vegetarian necromancer, as well as so many of the other characters. Unsure about whether I'll read more though, given Cooney's love of footnotes (which slowed down the reading a LOT).
(P.S. Just learned that this won the 2023 World Fantasy Award for best novel. Clearly, my misgivings are my own.)
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