The Keeper of Night by Kylie Lee Baker
Genres: YA and fantasy
Ren Scarborough is a young adult soul collector in London. She is half Reaper and half Shinigami,
the Japanese version of soul collectors. The only person that truly accepts her is her brother Neven
who happens to be a full Reaper. A situation Ren accidentally causes forces both her and her brother
to leave London and head to Japan. Ren hopes to be accepted by the Japanese Goddess of Death
only to discover her expectations of Japan weren’t accurate. Ren then sets out on a dangerous
mission with her brother and new friend Hiro to try and claim her place in the world.
There is a lot about The Keeper of Night that I like. First, I love the world Baker created.
Learning about the folklore and myths of Japan, and a little of Britain, was super interesting.
I adore the character of Neven, Ren’s extremely caring brother. This is a character type I usually
find myself eye rolling over, but not this time. I even found the mysteriously helpful stranger Hiro
interesting. Ren was a little more problematic for me.
Ren is the underdog who can’t seem to find her place in the world. She’s got super cool powers
but no one seems to care because all the characters have super cool powers. I like that she is
unapologetically ambitious. She doesn’t shy away from the fact that she wants power and respect.
Unfortunately, Ren spends way too much of the book in her head berating herself and going over
and over about how worthless she is. I get that she is supposed to have issues from where and how
she grew up, I’m fine with that, it just got a bit tiresome reading the same thing over and over.
I found it especially annoying when she would have these thoughts and then immediately the tides
would turn in her favor. Again, I don’t have anything against the ideas. My problem lies with the execution.
This leads into my biggest problem with the book and the reason I didn’t rate it higher. I found
Baker’s writing to be a bit inconsistent. Some parts were really well written and clever. Then, there
were other times that I had to reread something because I felt like it was an exact copy paste from
the previous page. I also feel like there wasn’t enough information given about the two societies we
get to see. The Reaper society hates Ren from the get go. Everyone hates her except for her brother,
who is a failure at being a Reaper because he is too empathetic. Her father seems to be more
apathetic to her than anything else which, for me, was very problematic. He is supposed to be a
British Reaper that had some illicit affair with a Japanese Shinigami. I have a lot of questions for this
man and all I really get is one line about how Ren asked him stuff and he never answered.
Ren and Neven travel from England to Japan by boat yet we barely get to see any of the journey.
I would have loved to read a bit about the death societies in other countries, even if it was just a
chapter for each one. How would Ren and Neven fit in in those places? Is the French death society
more or less empathetic than the British? When they get to Japan most of the people there don’t seem
to care about them. Here and there we are reminded that Ren doesn’t belong but outside of some
people calling her a foreigner or looking at her strangely nothing else happens. Ren and Neven walk
right into the Yomi, the Japanese city of death, and Ren immediately gets to talk to the Goddess of
Death. Ren gets sassed a little from her but then gets handed a mission and told to be on her way. I
feel like I am being told Ren is hated because of her parentage but I don’t get the motivation for the
hate. Or the motivation for the ambivalence in Japan. Maybe it gets cleared up in the sequel.
A quick glance at Baker’s Goodreads page reveals she doesn’t have many books under her belt so
I am hoping her writing will improve with time. I genuinely do like this book. I think her ideas are
interesting, her characters were engaging, and her pacing is spot on, at least for me. I’ll keep my
eye on her future works.
My Rating: 3.5/5
I purchased this book as one of my Book of the Month club picks.
I do not plan on adding it to my permanent collection.