Stephen’s god died a little after noon on the longest day of the year.
Paladin’s Grace has a hell of a first line.
I finished reading it last month, kept procrastinating about writing a review, and then decided it’d been so long I needed to reread it in order to write a decent review. If anything, it’s even more fun the second time. And the fact that in the middle of a pandemic I can focus on reading a novel cover to cover twice really says something for how engaging it is.
It’s hard to put this book in a category, except to say it’s a T. Kingfisher book. (Her fans will know exactly what I mean.) It’s a fantasy novel that’s also a romance, a character study, a mystery, a spy thriller, and a love letter to artisans. Oh, and this one has severed heads, so throw in some horror too. (Ursula does not shy away from the gore, oh my no, but she also doesn’t go overboard with it. It’s there, but she doesn’t linger on it, is what I’m saying.)
We start with Stephen, a Paladin of the Saint of Steel, the god mentioned in the first line. In this world (the same world as The Clockwork Boys and Swordheart) not everybody has a Close Personal Relationship with a god, but paladins definitely do. But while the death of Stephen’s god is a major plot point, the point of the book isn’t that death. The point is what became of his followers afterwards.
We pick up the story three years later, as Stephen is using whatever reasons he can find to just get out of bed in the morning. Interestingly, he’s doing better than you might think. He can have breakfast at the Temple, joke with his friend Istvhan, escort healers on their rounds; his heart has practically been apple-cored out of his chest, but he keeps showing up, without any hope of it getting better, but not willing to just give up. And when he’s bored he knits. I love that he knits.
And then there’s Grace, a perfumer, and Ursula says in her afterwords that she listened to a podcast about ancient perfumers, and she was obsessed. You can see that obsession in all the tiny details about Grace’s job, and it never stops being fascinating. The ingredients and how fussy they are when you’re working with them, the oils, the spices, the annoying trends of the people she’s selling to (she’s so freaking tired of sandalwood) all the way to the little glass bottles on the shelves and which craftsman she goes to for the wooden boxes she packages them in.
Of course nothing is as interesting as Grace herself, mostly because it takes a while to find out exactly what the hell happened to her. She’s definitely damaged, but she’s covered all the damage with layers of independence and determination. She’s absolutely brilliant, and she knows it, but she also second guesses herself every second, and doesn’t think she deserves good things to happen to her. She doesn’t think she’s a bad person, just a thoroughly weak and uninteresting one.
And in case you think this story is a big ole downer, you should know that when Grace and Stephen first meet, they pretend to have loud, hilariously bad fake sex. There’s reasons!
They’re smitten with each other, right from the start, but god forbid either one of them admit it. They both have their reasons why being with someone would be a Very Bad Idea, while their friends roll their eyes and tell them to get over themselves.
Meanwhile we have fancy court receptions for visiting royalty, floods, rescues, politics, escaped pets, brawls, baskets of yarn, and tons of wonderfully awkward glances between a pair of lovely, damaged idiots. Oh, and the severed heads I mentioned. Ursula thinks maybe romances shouldn’t have so many severed heads, but I disagree.
Normal people flirt. I think. Apparently we just exchange terrible life stories.
Beyond that I don’t want to give away any more of the plot, except to say there’s a lot of mysteries at the heart of this story: the death of Stephen’s god, several murders that may or may not be connected, and what the hell happened to Grace. And we won’t get all the answers, because by the end of the book there’s still a lot more story to tell. I’d say more but that would give too much away.
Some random thoughts though:
Grace and Stephen aren’t just horribly preoccupied with what people think about them, they’re horribly preoccupied with what they think people think about them, which is so much worse. A lot of Ursula’s characters struggle with the mental gymnastics of assuming everyone looks down on you and convincing yourself you don’t care. But it’s not as simple as someone needing to be “fixed” or “rescued” (Ursula dislikes a damsel in distress almost as much as Grace does.)
I love all of the characters in this book. The major ones certainly: Marguerite is stunning (in every sense, don’t turn your back on her), Bishop Beartongue is absolutely everything I’d want woman in power to be, and I could read a whole book about Istvhan. (Which is great, because according to Ursula’s afterwards we’re going to get one!)
People tended to assume that he must be stupid because of his size. This was a very dangerous thing to think.
But Ursula has this amazing talent for introducing minor characters and making you actually care about them in three pages or less. The blonde possibly-an-assassin, the White Rat Healer, the pathologist performing the autopsy, the gnome constable…heck, we only saw the burly priest of the Forge God for three paragraphs and I already want him to come back.
And the way Ursula writes powerful, smart people getting thoroughly exasperated is always fun.
This world Ursula’s building with these books keeps getting bigger, and she’s great at setting a scene. Every place the characters go to has such a distinctive feel, whether it’s the slums of Weaver’s Nest or the castle banquet, the brothels of the Scarlet District or the front room of Grace’s shop with all the tiny delicate bottles on the shelves.
And the details, argh, I’m so in love with all the details we get in this book. The fact that you use slips of paper to tell if someone sold you bad essential oils; the tapestries the royal house carries to each location and who made them; and how to attack someone with an ice sculpture of a swan and whether or not that’s similar to bludgeoning them with a frozen goose.
There’s a lot of new people to meet, as well as the return of familiar faces. (The gnoles! The Paladins of the Dreaming God! Zale!!)
There’s also several villains in this story, and they’re particularly loathsome, because it’s all about the lies and that nauseating feeling of being betrayed by someone you trusted. I really admire a writer who can give us a bad guy that has some subtleties but is still someone we can just flat out hate.
Oh and another thing I like? The fact that Ursula loves her some showers. Any time she wants to be nice to one of her characters, she lets them have a bath. Before food, before sleep, sometimes even before sex, if they’ve had a truly rotten day she gives them the chance to clean up and be comfortable and I respect the hell out of that.
I think the only thing I didn’t like in the book is a section that I wasn’t supposed to like, because it was awful. Not gore, not physical trauma of any kind, just the kind of moment where you want to shout at the page “stop it you people are horrible none of this is fair stop being so frigging mean!” If this kind of thing bothers you as much as me, I don’t think it’s spoilers to say you just have to grit your teeth and get past those pages, because it’s worth it. More than worth it. I mean, the first conversation Grace has with Istvhan is worth the price of the book all by itself.
I’ve read a lot of T. Kingfisher books, but for some reason last December I started a catchup binge and read Swordheart, Clockwork Boys, The Wonder Engine, Minor Mage, and now Paladin’s Grace. If you’re trying to distract yourself from (*gestures vaguely and emphatically at everything*) I highly recommend doing the same.