![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
(no subject)
I just finished T. Kingfisher's Paladin's Grace and had the interesting experience of being able to pinpoint exactly where I would have had the two characters fall in love if I were writing the book, and also if the romance plotline were not operating very strongly on genre romance beats.
Paladin's Grace is set in the same super D&D-influenced universe as Kingfisher's Swordheart and Clocktaur Wars with one crossover character from Swordheart (Zale, the fan-favorite practical genderqueer lawyer-priest) and one crossover theme from Clocktaur Wars ("let's explore what it's like to romance an angsty paladin!")
The paladin in this particular book is Stephen, a sad sock-knitting swordfighter whose god died of unknown causes a few years back, leaving Stephen and his fellow surviving paladins at occasional risk of unchecked berserker rages. In the first chapter, Stephen has a twenty-minute meet-cute with Grace, a perfume expert fleeing a terrible marriage (also a crossover theme from Swordheart, which I should probably have mentioned in the paragraph) and subsequently both of them, despite having been Off the Dating Market for the past several years due to their respective stressors, cannot stop thinking about each other!
The actual plot involves the arrival of a mysterious foreign dignitary who takes a fondness to Grace's perfume, several assassination attempts, and a probably-unrelated serial killer on the loose, none of which really impacts Grace or Stephen until the back half of the book, leaving them a lot of time to fill the front half with musing on how inconveniently into each other they are and how it can Never Be because a.) the other party couldn't possibly be into them (despite all signs to the contrary) and b.) they, themselves, are too sad and too convinced they don't deserve nice things to want a relationship anyway.
Stephen and Grace are both perfectly likeable protagonists and Kingfisher's pragmatic prose is always fun, but it did get me thinking again about how instant, intense attraction is one of the less interesting romantic tropes for me -- or maybe not even instant attraction, I don't mind that, people do meet people and start flirting right away, that's in character for some people. I guess the real thing is that I'd like some time for the characters to get to know each other as people before they start to think 'oh no, this is the person I'm going to act out of character for.' In a lot of romance novels, including this one, that beat kicks in extremely fast, because the fact that it's kicked in is part of what's driving the story forward. But I personally prefer a story that withholds that for a while so that when the characters do start acting out of their own self-perceived character as a result of their encounters with each other, you really feel the impact of it.
Anyway, the other thing I have to say is that the best character in the book is Grace's roommate and BFF Marguerite, a charming and mysterious spy whose plotline is entirely unresolved and whom I therefore trust will show up in subsequent books and continue to be the best character in them!
Paladin's Grace is set in the same super D&D-influenced universe as Kingfisher's Swordheart and Clocktaur Wars with one crossover character from Swordheart (Zale, the fan-favorite practical genderqueer lawyer-priest) and one crossover theme from Clocktaur Wars ("let's explore what it's like to romance an angsty paladin!")
The paladin in this particular book is Stephen, a sad sock-knitting swordfighter whose god died of unknown causes a few years back, leaving Stephen and his fellow surviving paladins at occasional risk of unchecked berserker rages. In the first chapter, Stephen has a twenty-minute meet-cute with Grace, a perfume expert fleeing a terrible marriage (also a crossover theme from Swordheart, which I should probably have mentioned in the paragraph) and subsequently both of them, despite having been Off the Dating Market for the past several years due to their respective stressors, cannot stop thinking about each other!
The actual plot involves the arrival of a mysterious foreign dignitary who takes a fondness to Grace's perfume, several assassination attempts, and a probably-unrelated serial killer on the loose, none of which really impacts Grace or Stephen until the back half of the book, leaving them a lot of time to fill the front half with musing on how inconveniently into each other they are and how it can Never Be because a.) the other party couldn't possibly be into them (despite all signs to the contrary) and b.) they, themselves, are too sad and too convinced they don't deserve nice things to want a relationship anyway.
Stephen and Grace are both perfectly likeable protagonists and Kingfisher's pragmatic prose is always fun, but it did get me thinking again about how instant, intense attraction is one of the less interesting romantic tropes for me -- or maybe not even instant attraction, I don't mind that, people do meet people and start flirting right away, that's in character for some people. I guess the real thing is that I'd like some time for the characters to get to know each other as people before they start to think 'oh no, this is the person I'm going to act out of character for.' In a lot of romance novels, including this one, that beat kicks in extremely fast, because the fact that it's kicked in is part of what's driving the story forward. But I personally prefer a story that withholds that for a while so that when the characters do start acting out of their own self-perceived character as a result of their encounters with each other, you really feel the impact of it.
Anyway, the other thing I have to say is that the best character in the book is Grace's roommate and BFF Marguerite, a charming and mysterious spy whose plotline is entirely unresolved and whom I therefore trust will show up in subsequent books and continue to be the best character in them!
no subject
no subject