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T. Kingfisher's Paladin romance novels are very easy-to-read stress-relief books, so I keep buying them and zooming through them in a night or so even though the by-now-well-established Kingfisher romantic schtick of "the hero simply Cannot Stop thinking about shoving his face in the heroine's Magnificent Breasts" does not have any particular direct appeal.

In the latest, Paladin's Strength, Istvan, another one of the berserker paladins of a dead god featured in Paladin's Grace, teams up with Clara, a Lay Sister with a Secret, on a double mission to track down a serial killer and rescue Clara's kidnapped nun friends. I will not tell you what Clara's Secret is, but her convent is the Order of St. Ursa, so ... you know. There are Clues.

Kingfisher describes this romance as a slow burn. I'm not actually sure I would agree with that description -- IMO, if both parties are already constantly thinking lustful thoughts and have already smashed faces at least once by the 33% mark, it's not what I personally would call a slow burn even it takes them a while to determine motive and opportunity for the full horizontal tango -- but I do really appreciate that a major cornerstone of the appeal for both of them is not "sexy height difference" but "sexy height similarity." Nothing against sexy height difference but this is a rarely seen and refreshing variation! Clara and Istvan are both firmly Tall 4 Tall and I respect this for them!

I also do very much still like the concept of berserker paladins whose god is dead and have to deal with what it means when you suddenly have to take personal responsibility for Being Very Scary instead of outsourcing it over to a god, and the fact that we get multiple books about them to show different people having different thoughts about that and ways of dealing with it.

Anyway, as an overall read I enjoyed this one more than Paladin's Grace, with one fairly significant caveat: like sophia_sol discusses in their review, I did not love the reveal that the evil clay-golem serial killers were accidentally created by a sad Ambiguously Neurodivergent And/Or Disabled man who just wanted somebody to love, in large part because it then follows that the Only Solution is for this man to die to stop his evil creations from wreaking further havoc. Especially did not love the part where our heroes don't kill him when they first meet him because they feel sorry for him, and then when their initial plan goes wrong are like "well, our compassion was a mistake, it's unfortunate but to prevent the subsequent murders we really should have just killed him at the time."

I also raised my eyebrows a little at Kingfisher's claims about the general unstoppable-killing-machine nature of bears, but as everyone knows I don't know very much about mammals and I'm sure Kingfisher knows more so it's entirely possible that she's a hundred percent correct.

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the evil clay-golem serial killers were accidentally created by a sad Ambiguously Neurodivergent And/Or Disabled man who just wanted somebody to love, in large part because it then follows that the Only Solution is for this man to die to stop his evil creations from wreaking further havoc.

That's not how golems work!

Oh good, it's not just me! It exasperated me so very much with her first foray (the Sord Roam Ants one), like "is this really all men think about!? I like women and this isn't all I think about?"

I don't think she believes *all* men think that, but I *have* listened to every episode of the Kevin and Ursula podcast, which sometimes gets drunkenly TMI about her romantic history, so I feel fairly confident in saying it is a case of write-what-you-know.

What kind of bears? In what season? Some species of bear are definitely a bit more on the ball on the "unstoppable predator" front than others, but some are pretty chill and lazy in most circumstances.

I've never read any Ursula Vernon or T. Kingfisher novels, and I can't decide whether I would like them or find them unthinkably twee. Tweeness doesn't seem to be a concern in this series admittedly, but I'm not a huge romance novel reader either.

I've never read any Ursula Vernon or T. Kingfisher novels, and I can't decide whether I would like them or find them unthinkably twee.

I've bounced off almost all of her prose fiction that I've tried, but I love her children's novel Castle Hangnail (2015); it has a strong hangover of Diana Wynne Jones, but in a way I really don't mind.

IMO, if both parties are already constantly thinking lustful thoughts and have already smashed faces at least once by the 33% mark, it's not what I personally would call a slow burn even it takes them a while to determine motive and opportunity for the full horizontal tango
Since I assume this is normal novel length, I generally agree; I have read fic I would confidently call slow-burn even though they started kissing a third of the way through, but where "a third of the way through" is after 100k+ words.

Her children's books are brilliant. I've never once met a reluctant reader who was not charmed by Hamster Princess and/or Dragonbreath. (Reluctant readers are, in my experience, slightly more likely than other readers to be very gender essentialist in their media consumption.)

Whether you, as an adult who is not a reluctant reader, would like them is another question, but I believe, hands down, that her books under the name Ursula Vernon belong in every classroom library and on every child's shelf.

I didn't like this one as much as Paladin's Grace, the pacing felt off for me and yeah, the plot wrap up felt sad and awkward. Still good and I read it quickly, but Paladin's Grace is one I reread.

Yes, I must agree re: the potter. Left quite a bad taste in my mouth. As a mystery, too, I thought the pacing was not helped by stretching it over two books with different protagonists -- despite being part of the whole climax, the Evil Heads plot felt like it got slightly short shrift in the front two-thirds of the book, and so the switch over to the A mystery plot from the first book in the back third felt a bit jarring/unearned.

I find all "lust at first sight" vaguely perplexing, but, you know, I do think Breasts are Magnificent, so I feel like I can excuse it a little :p

Seconding this at least as far as the library part! My kid isn't a reluctant reader, and Hamster Princess has remained a strong favorite as counternarrative to Disney princess/prince stuff.

I did not love the reveal that the evil clay-golem serial killers were accidentally created by a sad Ambiguously Neurodivergent And/Or Disabled man who just wanted somebody to love, in large part because it then follows that the Only Solution is for this man to die to stop his evil creations from wreaking further havoc. Especially did not love the part where our heroes don't kill him when they first meet him because they feel sorry for him, and then when their initial plan goes wrong are like "well, our compassion was a mistake, it's unfortunate but to prevent the subsequent murders we really should have just killed him at the time."

Oh wow. Thank you for the warning. I think I might skip this one.

OK, look, I didn't like the resolution of this particular point either, but Kingfisher never *calls* them golems, and these work completely differently.

Surely not every animated pottery humanoid needs be a classical Jewish golem, or even any kind of golem at all.

I actually liked it quite a lot, although the Smooth Men plot resolution was indeed kind of a mess. (IIRC, I don't think the potter actually had real mental problems, other than a certain level of "fanatical about his art," until one of his early creations whacked him in the head. But I would have to go back through it to be certain.)

Surely not every animated pottery humanoid needs be a classical Jewish golem, or even any kind of golem at all.

I haven't read the book. It was not clear to me that Kingfisher didn't call them golems, which—the influence of D&D notwithstanding—if the name is used, I do expect them to follow at least some of the traditional Jewish rules. (Which can get weird in its own right in secondary worlds that don't have Jews, but . . . eh.)

Oh, I agree. I was at first delighted that Pratchett included golems in Discworld, but also a bit taken aback because there aren't any Jews.

Arrrgh, I was wrong. I went and searched on my ebook. Hero and Heroine do mull over the idea of golems when he first tells her the real reason for his current journey, but neither of them seems to know much about the topic:
----------------------------------
"... A golem maker?"

"I thought the secret of making golem had been lost centuries ago."

"So did everyone else."
----------------------------------
Kingfisher has had the idea of animated beings of various materials before - it's a major part of her Clocktaur Wars duology - so by the end of the story, I had forgotten that golems were indeed mentioned.

So yes, apologies to everyone, the term does come up.

Edited 2021-04-20 01:37 (UTC)

I did too; it was less complicated than Grace, but it was a nice contrast that Clara was if anything more formidable (if less experienced) than Istvan--and as it developed, substantially better at tactics that didn't involve hitting things/people. (also, I finished it, um, yesterday).

The Smooth Men resolution was problematic, but...I don't know whether it's better or worse (more tropey) that by my read, they didn't "not kill him" because they felt sorry for him or murder him because it was The Only Way (although it pretty clearly was). Instead, it felt to me like they didn't kill him because they weren't -sure- it would solve what really was a serious problem (the Smooth Men had gone viral, duplicating them and spreading throughout the lands, murdering as they went), but they didn't want to murder someone if there was another way, and couldn't be absolutely sure killing him would end the problem. And, of course, the end was very much The Trope, but a very half baked one; despite having said several times it would have been more expedient, they can't expunge their progagonism to commmit murder, forcing him to See the Horror and take it of their hands.

I'm not sure, given that she wanted a Sympathetic Cause (which was a contrast to the speculation that it was an evil cult in Grace) how it could have been made better. Having the potter NOT be suffering brain damage would help a lot; just have him be innocent and in love with/abused by his own creation, until he realizes the Awful Truth in act three. Making him more of a character would probably also make his tropey sacrifice mean something. We have a through-line here of him bringing galatea to life, then the increasing abuse cycles, then a half-formed attempt to end it followed by more abuse and near abandonment, and finally resolve and a final sacrifice, but the whole thing is made more muddy and hapless by the dementia.

Ha, yes, that's more or less at the end of one book in a three-book trilogy if you go by novel standards, I would fully agree that counts as slow burn! It's truly all relative.

The romance in Paladin's Grace didn't work as well for me as in this one tbh -- the beats of when they started to feel really strongly about each other just came a little too fast for me -- but both of them were perfectly readable! I don't know if I'll reread any of them but I will keep reading them as they come out ....

Yeah, I was so disappointed not to have the Evil Heads resolved in the first book! and then the resolution of this one felt a bit anticlimactic in the context of the last one (I expected it to be something more sinister/intentional) as well as depressing re: the potter.

lol EXTREMELY fair point though

It has many enjoyable elements, but, also, this. >.<

You may well be right -- my understanding was that he wanted to make the smooth men because he was already Different and Lonely, which definitely added to my feelings of :/ about the plot, but I could very easily have misread it! I definitely enjoyed a lot about the book other than that and found it very readable, though.

I liked Clara very much!

I think I would have preferred the evil cult to the way this played out, tbh; in addition to the problem of the brain damage, the fact that we don't meet the creator until the back third of the book and the protagonists don't really have a reason to be invested in him means the whole thing feels sort of late and disconnected to the actual emotional arc of the plot anyway.

I've never actually read any of her Ursula Vernon stuff! I really should -- I sort of dove in at the T. Kingfisher end of the swimming pool and have stayed there, but I've heard only good things.

I don't find the T. Kingfisher stuff twee! It's definitely got a very specific Style and if you try one I think you will be able to tell pretty quickly if that style is one that works for you or if it doesn't. Of the books of hers I've read I probably liked the Clocktaur Wars duology best; it felt like reading someone's RPG fanfic but in an extremely very enjoyable way.

The first time around I was like "well this is just these characters I guess" but the more it happens the more I'm like "please, a different beat? perhaps at least a different body part?"

There's I think some potential interest in the idea of Golem Galatea but not, perhaps, this particular one ....

He never says there aren't any Jews. There could be Jews.

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