Seven Faceless Saints

Seven Faceless Saints is a competent YA novel that successfully builds a compelling central dynamic between its main characters even if it forgets to properly develop the conflicts that define their world.

The story is set in Ombrazia, a city where people blessed with magic become disciples and live separate lives from the “unfavored”, as magic is considered a divine gift bestowed by the saints. While these disciples enjoy special protection and rights, never being compulsorily drafted to fight in the war, for example, the common people are not that lucky. The flames of rebellion, then, are already being kindled when one of the disciples is suddenly murdered in their Palazzo and the chief of security, Damian Venturi, is tasked to solve the matter as quickly as possible.

Damian is described as “a fractured boy playing at commander.” He’s too young and inexperienced for the job, which he got because his father, Battista Venturi, is a fearsome and merciless general. Battista’s shadow looms heavily over his son: he’s that stern type that wears a constant look of bored disapproval on his face, as if he expected nothing but failure from his son – the type that Charles Dance can play in his sleep –, and Damian falls for it, building his whole life around a useless attempt to impress his father. With a low opinion of himself, and haunted by his brief time in the war in the North, Damian is too submissive to stand for himself and too broken to care.

Damian’s childhood friend, Roz, is his polar opposite. Despite being a disciple of Saint Patience, Roz is all anger and action. When we first meet her, she’s investigating another murder, since the victim, an unfavored girl, was not considered important enough for the police to bother. Roz is a close friend of the victim’s brother, which makes matters personal for her: despite her status as a disciple, she’s more connected to the common people than Damian, having been raised as one of them.

Roz also has dad issues, but of a different kind: her father was executed for being a deserter and his head was sent to her house in a box. Roz is deeply marked by this traumatic experience and so makes her life’s mission to change the system that allowed it to happen. Conflict is quickly established between her and Damian, as it was Battista – an old friend of Roz’s family – who ordered the execution.

But it’s not just his father’s actions that make Roz resent Damian. They were childhood friends who loved each other until he was sent North to the war, when consumed by guilt, he stopped answering her letters altogether, leaving her alone to grief. To add insult to injury, his political views clash directly with hers: not only his job is to protect the status quo but he also truly believes this protection is warranted. Damian believes the disciples are more important than the common people, he believes in the Saints, he believes in everything his father tells him, he believes in everything his Church taught him, he believes it all:

“A chill crept over Damian’s skin with the wind. Why didn’t people understand that the Palazzo existed to protect them? To represent them? As of late, the rebels’ main complaint was that the unfavored were being drafted to fight in the Second War of Saints, while the disciples had no such obligation. How could they? Their abilities made them the backbone of Ombrazia’s economy. Even Damian understood the difference.”

Roz has the makings of a revolutionary. She’s always posing questions, always looking to make a change in the world, being both fierce and empathetic. Damian, on the other hand, with a mindset to obey, the duty to prevent change, and a penchant for violence, has the makings of a cop. Roz believes people like Damian are raised to become tools of oppression, for the police were built to defend those in power, which leaves everyone else, by design, out of their jurisdiction.

She despises Damian because he’s a symbol of what she fights against. He’s not only a cop, but one who is complacent to injustice, who is eager to follow orders, and rarely – if ever – questions them, especially if they come from Battista. However, Damian has one redeeming quality that makes him unfit for his job: he has a gentle heart.

The derogatory word for this kind of people is “soft,” and this is precisely what Battista constantly calls his son, clearly disappointed by his inability to make political arrests or turn a blind eye to corruption. While the job expects ruthlessness and connivance out of him, Damian just wants to genuinely help everyone. This is the rope he extends to Roz, the way she can pull him back from the breaking point, for Damian may really believe in his job, but he believes in a romanticized, utopic version of it. He can’t handle that, in practice, he’s causing more damage to the world than anything else – and that this damage is expected of him is even worse.

When Damian and Roz eventually join forces to solve the murders, the novel shines because their dynamic is incendiary. They hold old grudges, have left a lot unsaid, and possess conflicting personalities, but the thing that makes their clash fascinating is that they care about each other. They want to make the other understand their point of view and understand where they’re coming from, so they cannot stop arguing.

Roz is constantly trying to make Damian question everything he holds true, challenging his preconceptions about the world, their society, and his faith. Despite being a disciple, Roz is a non-believer, refusing to treat her magic as a divine miracle or blessing – in her eyes, it’s even a curse – but Damian cannot fathom the notion that the Saints may not exist: if he has been taught his whole life that something is true then it must be. Indoctrination turns belief into an imperative: he can’t question his worldview because that would mean questioning his entire life. It’s too great an ask:

“Damian had to believe that. Because if he didn’t, then he was alone in an underground temple, face touching cold stone for no reason at all. If he didn’t, he would be forced to look back on every aspect of his life and feel foolish.”

This means that Damian is actually a terrible detective, because he let his prejudices about the world affect his conclusions in the investigation. If not for Roz, he would never get very far, for if a clue points to a conclusion that doesn’t align with his worldview, he struggles to take it into consideration. His first instinct is even to deny the clue’s existence altogether. After all, Damian “needed to trust in the things he’d been taught because they were all he had.”

There’s a great scene where Damian goes to Battista to confront him about the fate of his friend’s father, and question him about the cruelty of sending her family the head. Even after repeating to himself that he was going to do it right, and stand his ground, Damian immediately folds after his father’s first dissatisfied rebuke. Damian wants to impress his dad so much… and he can’t do that if he’s disobedient.

Roz, on the other hand, is unruly. She pushes her friends away because never doing what she’s told is her imperative. This makes it really difficult for her friends to trust Roz, as she’s always doing what she wants anyway – and behind their back, to boot. She lets her father’s death define her personality and dictate her actions: payback is her only goal and nothing will stop her from accomplishing it, not even her own feelings.

This makes the conflict between Roz and Damian not something that can be easily settled with a conversation. He either needs to change his personality, forsaking his beliefs and his father, or she needs to change hers, forsaking her cause and her father. Their love is impossible not because of the circumstances of society but because their life stories are in direct opposition: they can’t be together without sacrificing something important about themselves.

There’s a bitterness to their interactions that make them stand out from the playful jabs so common to the “enemies-to-lovers” trope. They make a point in being cold and cruel to each other, even regarding small things. When they’re conducting their investigation in a morgue, Roz asks Damian to stop calling her by her full name but he keeps doing it. And when we move to the next chapter, continuing the same scene but now from his point of view, we are reminded that he uses “Roz” when thinking about her: that is, he is purposefully using her full name as a weapon. And she was also responding in kind, using the term “officer” because she knows it makes him uncomfortable, reminding him of the distance between them.

And it’s funny how often they get distracted when they’re near each other. They are constantly aware of each other’s bodies (their movements, their distance to their own bodies) which leads them to try to repress their feelings and desire: “She was beautiful in an ethereal way. Untouchable. For the span of a breath Damian forgot she hated him. Forgot he didn’t trust her. When he remembered, the weight of it crushed him.”

Unfortunately, the book drops the ball when it comes to its main mystery. First, there’s not that many characters in the book, so the list of suspects is very thin. Then, there’s the villain’s motivations that struggle to reconcile his chosen victims with the person they want to “recruit”, as their murders antagonize that very person. Finally, the whole thing hinges on we buying the conflicts that make up that world’s politics and religion, which are elements left severely underdeveloped: the novel is so focused on the relationship between its main characters that it rarely stops to go in-depth into those subjects, to give them nuance. And the whole world feels too small as well, as if the city of Ombrazia were made of just the Pallazzo and one poor neighborhood.

It doesn’t help that worldbuilding here is too straightforward, with several paragraphs of exposition such as the one that explains how the disciples’ areas of expertise are based on their Saints: “Grace’s affinity for fabrics was matched by Strength’s affinity for stone, Patience’s affinity for metal, and Cunning’s affinity for chemicals.” It’s all explained in the first chapter, robbing the world of any sense of mystery and unknown, giving all away too quickly. A few pages later, the information is even repeated, “As a disciple of Cunning, Giarda knew poisons better than anyone. She should be able to sense the chemicals in Leonzio’s veins.”

In the end, Seven Faceless Saints succeeds largely because its two main characters are fascinating together, bringing the best and worst of each other, but the plot and worldbuilding could have used more pages of development.

July 15, 2024.