Marra is the third daughter of the king of a small, mostly useless kingdom. The only thing the kingdom has going for it is its harbor, which is why both the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom want it. When Marra's oldest sister is married off to the prince of the Northern Kingdom, everyone breathes a sigh of relief that a political marriage has saved Marra's kingdom from potential capture. But then that sister dies mysteriously and Marra's other sister is married off to the same man, one who Marra learns is abusive and simply vicious. Despite being trained in a convent, Marra decides that the only way to save her one remaining sister is to kill the king-to-be, and she'll enlist the help of anyone she can to get the job done.
I absolutely love Kingfisher's pragmatic and wry heroines (particularly Digger, which is also Kingfisher, but was published under the name Ursula Vernon), and Marra is no exception. Yeah, it takes her a while to figure out what she's doing, but she's determined, no matter how scary the world around her becomes. This is a fantastic twist on your average fairy tale — how many princess stories do you know of that center on a revenge murder plot and include a dog made of bones? — and I'll happily read many more of Kingfisher's books.
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