skygiants | Entries tagged with t. kingfisher

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: ( spoilers )

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!

I'm continuing to enjoy Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher's forays into high fantasy romance -- I read all of Swordheart in a day while lounging on

ep_birdsall's parents' couch, and it's very pleasantly doing the thing that it's doing, which is creating a palatable version of a time travel Viking romance full of characters who enjoy poking holes at the genre they're in.

The premise: middle-aged widow Halla has just unfortunately inherited an elderly relative-by-marriage's estate, and his remaining relatives have locked her in a room until she agrees to marry one of them.

Fortunately, also locked in the room with Halla is a magical sword containing the spirit Sarkis, of a murdered ~~Viking~~ northern mercenary who is sworn to serve the sword's owner!

The first half of the book is mostly them falling in love on the subsequent fantasy road trip, which confused me a little about pacing because I was reading in e-book and therefore didn't realize that there was a whole second half of the book, in which Halla and Sarkis acquire a genderqueer lawyer-priest to help sort out Halla's inheritance issues, plus an ox and a wagon-driver to transport the lawyer-priest, and they all troop back to Halla's town of Rutger's Howe (I'm guessing that's an homage to Ladyhawke;I don't think I'm supposed to be envisioning Sarkis as Rutger Hauer, but who knows) and have several more fantasy road trip adventures and it's all reasonably charming, albeit with a fairly significant amount of murder.

(At first I was mildly put off by Halla's habit of asking lots of questions constantly in the middle of fight scenes, which I was clearly meant to find charming but, like, maybe wait ten seconds for a slightly better time maybe? but I came round on it. Sarkis has, you know, many of the character flaws you would expect from a murder fantasy Viking who lives in your sword, but people generally call him on them, so that's fine.)

Apparently the start of a Vikings Trapped In Swords romance trilogy, at least one of which looks set up to be queer!

I read a review of T. Kingfisher's Clocktaur Wars duology that said it was "strangely difficult to describe," which puzzles me because I find it really easy to describe: it's a quest fantasy in which a small group of quirky characters attempt to complete a dangerous mission, while ~~the DM~~ the author occasionally throws backstory complications at them! I mean, it's an extremely very enjoyable iteration of this kind of story but the structure is very classic RPG.

For our character classes we have:

THE ROGUE - Slate, party leader, a pragmatic forger with code-breaking, lockpicking, and false-accounting skills who has Made Enemies In Her Time!
THE ASSASSIN - Brenner, the rogue's Snarky, Amoral, and Deadly ex-boyfriend!
THE PALADIN - Caliban, who used to kill demons until he got possessed by a demon and murdered a lot of people, now haunted by his former possession and his crimes! (but still very paladin-y)
THE SCHOLAR - Learned Edmund, a brilliant idealistic-but-clueless (and misogynistic) nineteen-year-old nerd from a cloistered scholarly order who has to Learn About The Real World!

With eventual bonus companion
THE GNOLE - Grimehug, an adorable but amoral nonhuman critter from an enemy city!

The country is being attacked by mysterious and unstoppable living clockwork critters from Anuket City, so everyone except the scholar and the gnole have been recruited from out of the prisons to go on a quest to Anuket City and figure out how they're being made and how to stop them, with magic tattoos that will eat them if they diverge from their mission.

(Learned Edmund volunteered and also was never in prison, so he doesn't get a murder tattoo.)

The first book, The Clockwork Boys, features the Gathering of the Fellowship and Questing Adventures; the second, The Wonder Engine, is Investigation In Anuket City. The party bonds, Caliban and Slate progress from UST to dedicated pining, demons and weird magic and occasional plagues and Slate's old enemies all provide complication, and it all feeds a very specific kind of fun fantasy quest party itch.

As a sidenote, I would one hundred percent have known that this book was written as a response to playing lots of Dragon Age even if T. Kingfisher hadn't said so in one of the author's notes, because ( spoiler )

T. Kingfisher's The Raven and the Reindeer is an enjoyable Snow Queen variant that stakes out its territory with a few clear thematic changes:

- Kai was always kind of a jerk
- Gerta is projecting feelings onto Kay that neither of them really have
- Gerta's journey of discovery and self-knowledge is largely about getting over Kay and finding true love with the robber girl

The book commits hard to these things, as well as to the talking raven, and the creepy reindeer magic, and the Finnish-Sami setting. It's a well-written quest story and I had fun reading it, but as soon as I finished it I was struck with an irresistible urge to go to my bookshelf and reread Anne Ursu's Breadcrumbs, which remains my all-time favorite Snow Queen retelling.

The books are doing extremely different things, so it's not really fair to compare them. The Raven and the Reindeer is a quest fantasy coming-of-age story, written for teens and adults. Breadcrumbs is a battle to the death against loneliness and depression as filtered through the iconography of fairy tales, written for eleven-year-olds. The Raven and the Reindeer is Robin McKinley; Breadcrumbs is middle-grade Utena.

Also, Breadcrumbs is not gay. Nor is it straight! Because everyone's eleven.

Now, having just said that it's unfair to compare them, I'm going to compare them anyways: ( talking about Gertas and Kays and robber girls in a spoilery fashion )

As a sidenote, I don't think I've ever actually read the whole original of Anderson's Snow Queen, but from similarities among all Snow Queen variants I have now collected the following important facts about the Snow Queen:
- snow is made of bees
- having a frozen heart makes you very good at math
- flowers are more helpful than almost any human being
- the best thing to do with a kidnapped child is make them do ice puzzles for you

Writing up Plain Kate reminded me that I never did a post about the other dark and non-romantic fairy tale that I read recently (...ish), T. Kingfisher's The Seventh Bride.

I'm familiar with Ursula Vernon aka T. Kingfisher mostly by proxy -- people talking about her and reblogging her stuff in my vicinity -- and I've been meaning to read her stuff for a while; I liked The Seventh Bride and thought it was well done, but I'm not sure it was the best place for me to start.

In The Seventh Bride, Rhea the teenage miller's daughter is deeply disconcerted one day to learn that a friend of the local lord has asked for her hand in marriage. Rhea has minimal interest in marrying a stranger at best, but she and all her family are aware that if she refuses, economic consequences could potentially be severe.

Before the wedding, Rhea's creepy new husband-to-be asks her to come to his creepy manor house in the middle of the woods and spend a couple of days there, which everyone agrees is WILDLY INAPPROPRIATE, but. (The author clearly wants you to feel sympathetic for the family and their predicament and their inability to help their daughter, and I do, but I kept wondering at this point why, even if they know they can't cancel the marriage, one of her family members doesn't at least go with her into the creepy forest! But that's another story.)

Anyway, although Rhea is aware that the situation is deeply sketch, she is nonetheless still surprised to find the creepy manor house populated by several other wives, each one weirder, angrier, and more magically cursed than the last.

What follows is an unnerving sharp-edged fairy tale full of the kind of surreal and vivid imagery that I associate with Peter Beagle, or even Angela Carter. Occasionally I felt that the prose style was a little bit at war with the actual story. Kingfisher/Vernon (both from this book and from the the other snippets I've seen of hers) has a light, warm authorial voice that gets a lot of its humor out of pragmatism -- it's the kind of thing I tend to like a lot, and often balancing that kind of voice with a darker story can work very well for me, but in this case I was thrown a little off-balance a few times as events got more and more Gothic and the cute pet hedgehog continued to look adorably sardonic about it. I liked the book overall, though, and will definitely be reading more Kingfisher.