The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen

Mercy Birdsall has been, through sheer force of will, single-handedly keeping her family’s funeral home business afloat. It’s a dangerous job that Hart has been doing solo since his last partner became his boss which means he’s got plenty of time to contemplate his loneliness and isolation from the larger world around him. We have Hart Ralston who is a marshal, tasked with patrolling the strange and magical wilds of Tanria and dealing with its undead problem, a common profession for demi-gods like him.

The fantastical comes in on the world Megan Bannen’s characters inhabit and the method in which their letters find each other. Of course, one of them pieces it together before the other, and then must work out what to do. The quick description is that this is an enemies to lovers riff on the classic Shop Around the Corner/ You’ve Got Mail storyline – two people who do not like each other end up writing to one another, although they don’t know that, and discovering that what they had interpreted as hate was actually something much closer to love.

The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy is by all counts a Fantasy Romance and finds ways to blend both genres in ways that help strengthen the other. There are a couple things that have held up the writing, one that it’s a weird book that is both very straightforward in its description but the minute you scratch at its surface it gets quite difficult to nail down, and second that this is a Romance tied up with death, grief, and soul crushing loneliness but is also very funny. This was a warm blanket of a macabre fantasy Romance about life, death, and making yourself actually live your life that I devoured in a day and have spent nearly a week searching my mind for how to review.

The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen