The Songbird and the Heart of Stone

A woman who was made a vampire against her will still prays to the sun god who has stopped answering, and she keeps praying anyway.

The offer is a heist through hell. Broadbent takes a condemned prisoner and a scarred bastard prince who keeps a prison, sends them down through the realms of death to gather the pieces of a dead god, and runs a romance along the whole length of it. Dante with a bargain at the front and a body count in the middle.

Faith is the thing to take seriously or the book collapses into set dressing. Mische was devout before she was turned and she is devout after, which is the harder position to write, and either her theology reads as a real load she is carrying or the sun god is a plot device with a name. Nothing else in the novel holds up if that goes.

The quest structure meters the romance and the metering is visible. Each realm supplies an obstacle, the obstacle supplies proximity, the proximity advances the two of them by a fixed increment. That is efficient and it is legible, so by the third descent she can predict the emotional distance travelled per chapter, and a slow burn that runs on a schedule is not really burning.

Mische is the reason this works and Broadbent built her carefully. Relentlessly cheerful in a way the earlier books used as comic relief, revealed here as a discipline rather than a temperament, and the gap between how she presents and what she is carrying is the whole characterisation.

Asar is grumpy sunshine done with more care than the label suggests. A necromancer running a prison, scarred, unloved by his own house, and Broadbent keeps his competence and his damage in the same frame rather than letting one excuse the other.

Being handed an order by a god you love and a task by a god you fear is the actual premise. Mische is carrying instructions from both directions and cannot satisfy either without betraying the other, which is a strong engine, because the betrayal is scheduled from the first act and the reader watches it approach.

When she prays, when she bleeds, when she chooses, the same god is listening and the listening is not comfort. Broadbent writes devotion as a relationship with somebody who has power over you, and declines to make that cosy.

The underworld is built as a sequence of tests rather than as a place, which is the structural weakness. Realms arrive, get solved, get left, and the geography exists to be traversed rather than inhabited. Compare the sun-cult material, which has texture because Broadbent cares about it.

Broadbent's prose is doing more than the shelf usually asks. Short paragraphs, hard line breaks for emphasis, an appetite for the grotesque, and a willingness to leave a sentence unpretty when unpretty is what it needs to be.

Romantasy gets accused of treating theology as decoration and this is the counterexample. A god here is not an aesthetic. He is somebody with demands, a history of violence, and the power to withhold, and the book treats worship as a transaction with an unreliable counterparty.

She was a bride of the sun and now she is walking down. Both of those are choices she keeps making, and the novel says so.