Review: Paladin's Grace

Paladin's Grace by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I came to this one straight from Swordheart , which I'd enjoyed, but I did my usual check of the negative reviews to see who didn't like it and why. The main complaint seemed to be that it wasn't an adventure fantasy, but a romance, and since I quite like a romance from time to time (and had enjoyed the one in Swordheart) that was more a selling point for me than otherwise.

The couple in Paladin's Grace and the couple in Swordheart felt, for a while, like they were exactly the same couple under different names, but differences developed. "Paladin of a recently dead god" is different from "magically trapped in a sword for centuries", and "widow of a vague man who didn't really understand sex" is different from "ex-wife of a toxic, gaslighting narcissist," but the differences go beyond those. Paladin Stephen is angsty in a different way from the magical sword fellow, Sarkis, and expert perfumer Grace is competent in different ways from the pragmatic housekeeper Halla. There are enough similarities that, if you liked one book, the chances that you'll like the other are high, but enough differences that you don't feel like you've just read the same book twice.

Not the least of the differences is the B plot that provides both complications and momentum to the main romance plot in each book. Swordheart involves a great deal of travelling and encountering various people who want to steal from Halla, whereas Stephen and Grace spend all their time in the same city, trying to solve a couple of mysteries, in one of which Grace is the authorities' prime suspect.

I will mention a few things that irritated me slightly, but were a long way from being fatal. The use of biblical names in a setting where the religion is explicitly not Christianity or Judaism is a pet peeve of mine, but I'm becoming more ready to forgive it. The author is not particularly good with possessive plurals, occasionally hyphenates when she shouldn't, uses "lay" for "lie" a few times (arguably a dialect difference rather than an error, but generally considered an error), and misuses a couple of other words, but other than that the editing is generally good. Both books also commit POV switches within a scene (one each). This book has a little bit of a deus ex machina, too, to get the characters out of a hole that the author has dug so deep that they need the rope ladder thrown down to them.

Aside from that, this is a strong romance between competent, pragmatic older characters (in their 30s) who wear their pragmatism as a cloak over strong feelings of personal inadequacy, driven along at a good pace by a pair of mysteries. Along the way, we get deep into the characters' heads, and I liked what I found there.

Recommended.

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