It is raining in Brooklyn, and a lonely girl is sitting on her school’s front steps reading a pathology textbook nobody assigned her, trying to calculate how much water the soil can hold. A stranger runs toward her with a long, oddly shaped backpack held over her head. It holds a bow and arrows, for archery practice or the zombie apocalypse, and within a few minutes the two of them are laughing and heading off for hot chocolate. Mortal Things by Marie Lu places this scene early, in a short interlude, and it turns out to be the novel’s real foundation. Years later one of these girls will trade her life to keep the other alive, and the price of the bargain is that the friend she saved will never know her again.
What Mortal Things Does Between Chapters
Most of the book is narrated by Rose Lin Fairchild in an urgent present tense: a Harbinger of the god of Death, collecting souls around London in the weeks before Christmas while competing for promotion against Étienne Beauchard, the Regent of Lies. It is competent, swift and occasionally breathless. But between the chapters Lu does something more interesting. She steps outside Rose and addresses the reader as a passerby. You are the commuter at the bus stop who sees a mugging. You are the jogger in Central Park who envies two girls their picnic of cake and ice cream. And you witness something, then time folds and you forget it, and you walk on wondering why those two strangers looked familiar.
It is a quietly brilliant device for a novel about erasure, because it makes the reader complicit in the forgetting. Each interlude shows the friendship from outside, and as the story deepens, the outside view starts to reveal what Rose could not see from inside it. Later interludes turn to other characters, and they reframe earlier scenes so neatly that a second reading of Mortal Things by Marie Lu would be a different experience.
A Book About Being Forgotten
The premise of Mortal Things by Marie Lu asks a harsh question. Every Harbinger is someone who was offered life at the point of death, and the bill for that life is that everyone who loved them forgets they existed. The novel keeps returning to this, and its best scenes are all variations on it.
A thirteen-year-old Harbinger of Earth, nicknamed Cookie, chose the bargain so her parents would never have to grieve her. Late in the book Rose finds her standing among trees she once planted with her father, on a farm her family is selling, to parents who are expecting another child. Her anger at her goddess, and then her collapse into that goddess’s arms, is the emotional peak of the novel. In Paris, Étienne helps an older woman across a snowy street, and she thanks him politely, as one thanks a stranger. She is his mother. Lu writes both scenes with restraint and lets them hurt. Neither depends on the gods’ politics, and neither needs a single spell to work. They are about families going on without someone, which is a grief most readers will recognise, and they give the fantasy a weight that its duels and chases never quite match.
Rose’s own wound is older. She was given up as a baby and has built her identity around the conviction that something about her must be wrong. Her habit of translating feelings into medicine, from stress cardiomyopathy to the brain’s flare of activity at the point of death, reads at first as quirk and gradually as armour. The novel’s eventual answer to her question is moving, though readers may find it arrives with a convenience the rest of the book has not prepared for.
The Romance Asks for Too Much
The love story is where Mortal Things by Marie Lu is weakest, and not for lack of chemistry. Étienne is funny, gallant and quick, and the banter between him and Rose has real snap. A dance with him below Sacré-Coeur is the most romantic passage Lu has written. The trouble is what the plot later asks Rose to forgive. Without giving it away, the book uncovers something in his past that ought to shake their bond to its foundations, and then lets love settle the matter in a chapter or two. A novel this serious about the cost of bargains is oddly casual about the cost of this one.
Raven, the god of Death, is the more complicated figure, glimpsed in a memory of the mortal soldier he once was and named for a bird that would not stop calling for its dead mate. He is easily the most intriguing character in Mortal Things by Marie Lu, which makes it frustrating that so much of what we learn about him arrives in speeches. The supporting gods fare worse. The goddess of Love, the Regent of Love and several others exist mostly to deliver information, and a late spell of exposition slows a book that had been moving at a sprint. There is also a small wobble over which war Raven fought in, which a careful copyedit should have caught.
None of this spoils the momentum, which stays high, but it does mean the novel’s second half trades the mystery’s tension for a long run of answers. The darkness is real for a young adult novel. Death is constant, a terminally ill child among its subjects, alongside abuse, captivity, torture and the grief of adoption, though the romance stays at kisses.
Marie Lu’s Long Road Here
Marie Lu moved from China to Texas at five and learned English by writing stories, which may explain a career built on outsiders fighting to belong. Her debut, Legend, began as a teenage reimagining of the rivalry between Valjean and Javert in Les Misérables, and she has returned to that shape, two adversaries bound together, again and again. The Young Elites was her first fantasy, and the Stars and Smoke books took her into spy thrillers. Most recently she wrote her first novel for adults, Red City by Marie Lu, an alchemical crime saga set in Los Angeles.
Mortal Things by Marie Lu sits between the two strands: a young adult book in its heroine and its heat, but darker and sadder at its core than her earlier work. Its epigraph is the opening of Emily Dickinson’s poem about Death as a courteous carriage driver, and the choice is telling. The poem’s Death is a gentleman who takes his time, and so is Lu’s.
What It Leaves Behind
Readers who liked the bargains and divided loyalties of The Things Gods Break by Abigail Owen will find similar pleasures here, and those who enjoyed the scheming city of Immortal Longings by Chloe Gong will recognise the appeal of a world where every alliance is provisional. The book was published on 27 October 2026, and its ending leaves the door open for more.
What lingers after Mortal Things by Marie Lu is not the duel of gods or the kiss. It is two girls on a staircase arguing about a potted tree one of them drowned through love and overwatering. Lu knows that the hardest thing to save is a friendship that only one person remembers.