The Keeper of Night

Kylie Lee Baker’s a novelist whose Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng and The Scarlet Alchemist duology have been on my to be read tower for a while so I picked up her young adult fantasy debut novel as it was available in my local library.

Though the story is set in the 1890s, it has very little to do with the human world of the time: it follows a non-human protagonist dealing with the two supernatural worlds she inhabits due to her Reaper father and Shinigami mother, starting in England and then moving to Japan.

With inspiration from Japanese folklore and Shinto mythology, it’s largely about protagonist Ren’s quest to destroy three Yokai so that Izanami, the Goddess of Death, will accept her as a Shinigami. It’s also about her relationship with her younger brother—a Reaper who didn’t fit in well because of his unusually gentle soul—and a stranger she meets in Japan—a former Shinigami with a deformed foot, cast out for being physically imperfect. But most of all, The Keeper of Night is about Ren’s desire to belong, and what she’s willing to do to earn a place among the Shinigami after being rejected by the Reapers.

A engaging and well-paced tale that expresses much about this mythology and I am keen to read the conclusion in The Empress of Time.