Review: Silver and Shadow

Silver and Shadow by Melissa McShane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While I don't love every Melissa McShane book I've tried, I enjoy most of them, and they're always exceptionally well edited. This one is well up to her usual standard.

One of the things I like is that, rather than just rehashing someone else's premise, she always comes up with something original, including original worldbuilding. Here we have a Dark Goddess who is the good one and a Bright Goddess who's the evil one, already an intriguing trope inversion, and the Dark Goddess has paladins who are all women. There's a good reason for this: Because women are usually physically weaker than men, the fact that all of her paladins are supernaturally strong is even more of a proof of her intervention than if she started with men in the first place. They're not just D&D paladins; they're paladins, but given a fresh concept that both makes sense and sets us up for an interesting story.

One of the main characters is such a paladin, sent on a solo mission after an unfortunate incident that leaves her feeling guilty even though she knows she didn't do anything wrong. The other MC is a werewolf, from a species created by the Dark Goddess - but he's chosen not to serve her, not to be a monster. The paladin, who has spent her life fighting the Dark Goddess's monsters, has some major prejudice to overcome when they meet and, by force of circumstances, team up.

There's a mystery to solve, some fighting to be had, significant moral choices to be made, mistakes to recover from, mutual attraction to negotiate, and in general a cracking plot. This is good solid fantasy, and I wish there was more of it and less tepid, poorly written, poorly punctuated clone-army nonsense to sort through in order to find the occasional gem like this.

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