To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer, #2) by Veronica Roth
Narrator: Helen Laser, James Fouhey, Nina Yndis, Tim Campbell
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, fantasy, urban fantasy
Series: Curse Bearer #2
Pages: 229
Length: 5 hours and 46 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on September 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

#1 New York Times bestselling author Veronica Roth pulls from Slavic folklore to explore family, duty, and what it means to be a monster in this sequel to the USA Today bestselling novella When Among Crows
A funeral. A heist. A desperate mission.
When Dymitr is called back to the old country for the empty night, a funeral rite intended to keep evil at bay, it's the perfect opportunity for him to get his hands on his family's most guarded relic—a book of curses that could satisfy the debt he owes legendary witch Baba Jaga. But first he'll have to survive a night with his dangerous, monster-hunting kin.
As the sun sets, the line between enemies and allies becomes razor-thin, and Dymitr’s new loyalties are pushed to their breaking point.
Family gatherings can be brutal. Dymitr’s might just be fatal.

My Review:

Everyone believes that they are the heroes of their own stories. Even the monsters. Perhaps, especially the monsters, so that they have justification for the villainies they permit. And commit. If the end truly justifies the means, then ANY means, no matter how terrible, are permissible in order to serve a righteous cause. It’s all about ‘the greater good’ and is precisely what makes that phrase so monstrous.

The story that began in When Among Crows presents the reader with both sides of that eternal conflict in this particular world. Our world, but a variation of it where magic walks among us and hides in not-so-plain sight.

The Knights of the Holy Order believe that their ‘war’ against magical creatures is righteous, because whenever they meet one of those creatures that hides behind a human face, the creature does its damndest to kill the knight however it can. So the knight feels justified in killing any such creature whenever and wherever they are found – and even hunting them down for that very purpose.

But those creatures tell a different story. Every single one of them is hunted. Every single one has lost friends and loved ones to the knights. And every single one of them is no match for the knights and their magic. From the creatures’ perspective, the creatures generally don’t hunt the knights, but are all too aware that if a knight finds them, they are already dead. So they fight as best as they can with whatever they have, whether knives, teeth, claws or shapeshifting. The creatures feel like they have no choice, just as they had no choice to be born what they are.

Knights, however, are MADE to be what they are.

Dymitr, Knight of the Holy Order from a long line of such knights, came to Chicago to beg Baba Jaga to destroy him, because he can no longer bear to commit the atrocities expected of him. He knows the creatures he’s been taught since childhood to kill are merely people with magic – just like himself.

Instead of killing him, Baba Jaga makes him into something that has never been, a knight who is also a creature. His family will kill him when they know. But he has a task to complete for Baba Jaga in order to claim his new life. A task that will take him back to the last place that he and his new friends should EVER go.

Dymitr really can’t go home again. But the only way to learn that – all the way down to his bones – is to go there anyway. And take his two dearest friends along with him for the terrible journey.

Escape Rating A+: This second book in the Curse Bearer is every single bit as excellent as the first book, When Among Crows. It also really, truly does not stand alone, so start with Crows.

Howsomever, a part of that ‘not standing alone’ is that the reader – or listener in my case and the narrators were all marvelous AGAIN – comes into this book already knowing these people and caring about them, so this one also gave me a bit of an approach/avoidance conflict. I needed to see how this story ended, BUT I didn’t want to actually experience each of the terrible things that happen to these characters, because I like them and wanted them to be okay. Which they are in the end but absolutely not unbloodied, unchanged, unscarred or untraumatized.

This story, and this series, takes these people we’ve come to know and love and takes them on a walk through some very dark places because those are the places they need to go to get redemption. So the story is not exactly fun but it is ALWAYS compelling – and sometimes even more so because of the darkness it has to travel through.

Putting it another way, this was a bit of a train wreck book, not in the sense that the book is terrible – instead it’s terribly good – but in the sense that I knew something terrible or terrifying or both was about to happen to the characters, whom I liked very much, and I didn’t want to watch but still NEEDED to see.

The series, so far at least because damn I hope there are more, is Dymitr’s, even though his is not the only perspective we get to experience. Dymitr is the curse bearer of the series’ title. In When Among Crows, his eyes were fully opened to the truth, or at least A truth, about his own people by seeing them through the eyes of their enemies.

The Knights have always told their story as a ‘secondly’ story, in that they justify their actions towards the creatures they hunt because, in the present at least, any creature they find attacks on sight. That the zmora and the strzyga (both avian shapeshifters) and all the others attack when cornered because that’s the only option they have doesn’t matter to the knights because they believe their mission is a ‘holy’ one.

But those creatures, those people, are only defending themselves. They’d be happy to live and let live if they only could. Or perhaps there was a point where they would have. Now, there’s so much history and blood on both sides that peace between them might not be possible. And doesn’t THAT sound familiar?

So that first story took Dymitr into the belly of the first beast, to the supernatural community of Chicago, so that he could see that the creatures he had been taught to hunt were merely people. This second book takes him home, to learn first-hand and as painfully as possible that the people he loves, the people who taught him to fight and hunt monsters – are the true monsters.

What he’ll need to reckon with in later books in the series – if they ever exist and I sincerely hope they will – is that he is part of both sides and that they are part of him. That he still loves people who are creatures AND people who are monsters. Even if only one side is still willing to love him back.