For the last year, my favourite books list has included a mixture of “cozy” and “weird”. It’s hard to get me in the mood for something too traditional; I’m enjoying books with romantic elements but get frustrated by lack of non-relationship plot; and I think nothing will ever live quite up to my euphoric feelings of “wtf” with Harrow the Ninth. A friend recommended Paladin’s Grace to me and I am so grateful for that! I devoured it and the sequel, Paladin’s and am disappointed Scribd and my library don’t have the third book yet because I don’t have a reliable replacement for audible (recommendations?).
The plots of both books are dual-POV, like all the best romances. Paladin’s Grace follows Stephen, a berserker paladin still reeling from the aftermath of his god dying, and Grace (lol), a perfumer with a traumatic past. Stephen now works for the uber-practical order of the White Rat and keeps his trauma at bay by knitting (no, really; it’s adorable). Grace finally has a life she’s happy with and worries it’s all going to slip away. Stephen helps Grace out of a tight spot and walks her home, and then they keep running into each other–and trouble along the way, as they get embroiled in a spot of political intrigue between two city-states (countries? kingdoms? polities? it’s a little unclear). Also, someone is leaving severed heads in the slums: no bodies, just the heads.
At its core, Paladin’s Grace is a romance. The political intrigue plot serves both to further the slow-burn romance and offer some interesting non-romance elements as well. But it is grounded by the delightfully creepy subplot about the heads: a little touch of horror that could have clashed horribly with the romance but works incredibly well (for me) to keep things interesting.
This subplot is picked up as the main storyline in Paladin’s Strength, which follows a different member of Stephen’s order: Istvhan, who was a delightful secondary character in the first. Istvhan is sent on a secret mission to try to follow the source of the heads and along the way encounters Clara, a lay-sister (not a nun, as she repeatedly emphasizes) of the Order of St Ursa, who is on a mission of her own to rescue her captured sisters. Their paths follow the same direction, which is good, because they grow rather reluctant to part…
The second book delves a little more gleefully into the horror elements of the first and is also a little more plot-based overall. I think I enjoyed it slightly less than the first–although Istvhan and Clara are both delightful!–but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I think I missed the political elements from the first. Also, there’s a lot of travelling, which is often not super interesting to me. It’s not a boring book, certainly, but much of the first half of the book feels like a bit of a waiting game: waiting for the characters to divulge their secrets (to each other and to the audience), waiting to get to the destination, waiting for the romance… although that last one isn’t necessarily a bad thing! Like Paladin’s Grace, the sequel is a slow burn–maybe a little too slow, because by the culmination it’s more contrivances keeping them apart than anything else. While Stephen and Grace are a little more cute and hesitant, Istvhan and Clara are a little more sexy: both know what they want and how they want it, but it’s all the feelings that get in their way. The sexual tension, however, is great, even when it keeps getting put off past its natural point.
There’s a lot of great stuff here for the modern fantasy reader. Cool worldbuilding (the different places do actually feel culturally different), and some neat low magic–there are wonder-workers who are ‘blessed’ with gifts, some of them a little useless, and not enough to usually impact the world to a huge degree, as well as some fantasy species, like gnolls. Also some good LGBTQ+ rep–apparently the paladin in the third book, who’s been a solid secondary character in the last few, is gay. (At first, I actually thought Clara’s secret was going to be that she was a trans woman, but there’s a scene pretty early on that shows she’s not–but a different, albeit much more minor, character is). My friend who recommended it and I did complain about the names a bit (for some reason I’m fine with Stephen and Grace and Clara, but there’s an Ethan and a Jorge, and for some reason those were too much for me).
Also, as a lot of other reviewers point out, these books thankfully aren’t centred on hot teens. The characters are in their mid- to late thirties. They’ve lived lives, had other lovers (good and bad). Istvhan and Clara joke about how tired and sore they are now that they’re in their later thirties. (Side note: I saw some reviews calling these characters middle-aged and my god, I have never felt so old at almost 34 than I did then). I especially felt for Grace, who had never had a lover who actually cared what she enjoyed in bed, so she was convinced she was bad at sex–and the sex scenes in Paladin’s Grace therefore felt especially wholesome for that reason. Perhaps it’s funny to call these books with some quite explicit (though I wouldn’t say graphic) sex scenes ‘wholesome’, but to me, they were. They were charming and a little funny and sometimes awkward, and they felt deeper and more real than the ‘oh my god his **** is so huge’ sex scenes I’ve encountered in more NA fantasy.
I listened to both on audio: The narrator, Joel Richards, did a pretty good job. His voice is very deep and rich, and he does different voices well (not obnoxiously). His Istvhan voice in particular is great: a little gravelly. I would have preferred to have a woman with him to read the scenes from the love-interests’ POVs (sometimes it’s a little unclear when the POV switches). But that’s more a production issue than his, and his female voices didn’t bug the crap out of me, so that’s a win!
