Deathly Fates by Tesia Tsai
Kang Siying is a priestess whose job is to guide the dead home, and it helps her earn a living. It’s helped her not be afraid of death. But when her own dad becomes ill, Siying finds her fear and knows she needs to do everything within her power to get her dad the medicine he needs. She’s offered a really lucrative job that comes with plenty of danger: go to an unfriendly state to retrieve the corpse of a missing prince. She needs the money, so she takes the gig.
Things are not normal once she arrives, though. Putting her talisman on the corpse of the prince reanimates him, rather than simply putting him under a spell that forces him to obey her orders. Siying knows he won’t stay alive long if he doesn’t have enough life force within him.
So the prince makes her an even better offer than the one she’s already taken. She’ll help him find and purify evil spirits to build his life force. But as she’s on this quest with him, battling all kinds of evil spirits, Siying starts to learn what caused the prince to go missing, and it might be coming for her now, too.
The Chinese folk practice of necromancy inspires this one. Necromancy in general has been an interesting theme in several YA books over the last year. — Kelly Jensen