My short review is simply: It’s like Terry Pratchett wrote Dragon Age fanfic for a female-gaze audience.
My long review obviously has a lot more words.
Comparing things to Terry Pratchett is… not something I do lightly. I know it has a lot of *waves hands vaguely* for a lot of people. So to be clear – T. Kingfisher (which is Ursula Vernon in her adult prose-fiction hat) is using a very specific type of humour that is one of the defining traits I love about Pratchett… she’s highlighting the mundane aspects of the fantasy world, the stupid comments about socks, the wondering what happens to the bodily fluids of magic sword men, that emphasises the humanity of her characters. Much like, no matter what nonsense is happening in Discworld, the characters feel like actual people, who respond with actual concerns about day to day life (albeit a little aggressively caricatured), so too do the characters of Paladin’s Grace (and her other books set in the same setting, which I binged). I don’t think it’s that she’s attempting to copy Pratchett, or anything like that, just that there’s a commonality in the way they make their characters feel. Not only are they ignoring the fantasy tendency to whitewash over the dull and functional but necessary concerns of human life, they’re choosing to lean in, and so make their worlds feel all the realer for it, because well… everyone still does laundry… even as it’s a source of humour because… well… no one does laundry in fantasy novels.
I am extremely here for it.
But there are differences, and there’s one I really want to focus on, because it’s the one that really struck me throughout reading – the extent to which her books are so obviously not exclusively for the male gaze.
I read plenty of books these days by women, and either aimed at women or not aimed at any gender specifically. And that’s great. But it wasn’t until reading this that I realised how few trad-pseudo-medieval fantasy books I’ve read that are not-male-gaze. All the examples I can think of are either YA (your Trudi Canavans and the like) or… quite trash-trash… (the Deverry books, for example). Whereas even in your Pratchetts and other good medieval fantasy, I often find the romances particularly meh because the men don’t feel plausibly fanciable*… either they don’t feel real, or they feel like they’re trying more to appeal to a sense of what the male reader might want to be in the romance, rather than any idea of what a woman in that pairing might want to actually romance/be romanced by.
Obvious caveats here for me not speaking for all women etc. etc. you know the drill.
The best example I feel like I can give isn’t actually fantasy, but bear with me. I recently played through Mass Effect 1-3, and found myself very often grumbling about the romance I ended up pursuing. If you want to play a woman, your options are almost entirely dull, creepy (don’t fuck the PA or the ex-work-experience kid) or both. At the end of Mass Effect 1, there’s *gasp* a sex scene. It looks SO FUCKING WEIRD as fem-Shep… the way it’s set out seems to lean into traditional heterosexual depictions of sex on screen… and then they’ve just swapped the characters round. Everyone moves wrong and it was weird and awful. There’s also a very sexy alien who tries to seduce you on a space station and the way she goes about it… it’s hard to exactly put my finger on details, but it reads heavily as “cyberpunk sexy lady flirting with man”. With a woman in the protag role it just, again, felt weird and awful. This persisted (though got slightly less bad) all the way through the trilogy, and I think it’s one of the two primary reasons I just didn’t love it the way I love Dragon Age**. It wasn’t For Me, and it meant I struggled a lot with immersion. It was so clearly, so constantly, geared for a male audience that I just felt alienated out of it.
And this is true of a lot of books, albeit not quite so strongly.
So when I come to read a book like Paladin’s Grace, where I suddenly feel catered to… the rush is really quite something. It’s hard to appreciate the extent to which I’ve got used to just going “eh” at the romance aspects of trad-fantasy novels until I encounter one that isn’t “eh”. I felt SEEN and WANTED and WELCOME and it was GREAT***. And I think the primary reason for this is the way the male protagonist/love interest is written – the first word that springs to mind for me to describe him is simply “adorable”. Not… necessarily the word of choice for protagonists in traditional fiction aimed at men, hm?
There’s a lot else to love about the book (and again, her others in the same world – they share a lot in common so let this review stand for them all, in terms of how much I love them).
The story follows Stephen, who is a burly paladin whose god has died, and is trying to find his place in a world without the faith he previously fought for (yes he is a sword doofus and I love him – he knits socks), and a female perfumer caught up in some political shenanigans (she’s amazing, intelligent, funny and complex and I kind of want to be her). Their paths cross, mutual pining occurs, hilarity, nonsense and thrilling derring-do. There’s even an attempted murder to solve. In many ways, it’s not particularly exciting. But it’s in the details and the execution that the joy comes – the protagonists are both well-written and, while quirky, still very believably human. They both have complicated backgrounds they have to navigate and their own doubts and insecurities that make them absolute numpties when dealing with other people (but in a plausible way). The world around them is well drawn, funny and interesting – it’s not explained in a great deal of depth at any point, but each part you see makes good sense as you see it, and isn’t ashamed to be both intensely trad-fantasy nor to subvert it at the same time. It lets the realities of human life intrude on the fantasy constantly, and uses that to ground both the people and the plot, as well as create the funnies. It has (quite a few) moments of genuine, laugh out loud humour – I definitely found myself cackling at several points. It’s… an unsurprising story but just so well, so competently and so amusingly told.
I gave it five stars on Goodreads because it’s a pretty much perfect example of what it’s trying to be. It’s hard to find fault, and there’s nothing I’d change about it because nothing would make it better at being that. The “that” in question may not win awards or shake the foundations of the SFF literary establishment, but nor did it need or want to. It is a book written to be comforting and fun and funny and joyful, and it achieves them all with room to spare. I could easily read another five (or more) books in the same mould as this, and I would have the same cosy and contented reading experience.
I love it with the same force I reserve for some of my oldest favourite books, and I know it will be something I will come back to in future, and it will still bring me joy every time. It is a cup of tea and a biscuit in book form, and it is intensely soothing. You should definitely read it.
*”plausibly fanciable” is the term I use to explain what I want in Bioware RPG romance interests. I don’t have to personally fancy them, they don’t have to be my type, but I have to be able to at least see why someone would. It’s the difference between a friend dating someone and me going “huh, good for them, he seems nice” and “… what?”. A lot of trad-fantasy men are, ime, very much in the latter category.
**The other being the cyberpunk-esque future they’ve chosen where even if you’re full bore good guy by their standards, you’re still a maverick cop who plays around/breaks the rules to get results. I… do not like this.
***I’m talking specifically about feeling catered to as a woman here because it’s… what I can talk about. The books have a lot of low-key rep across a wide spectrum, and I’d like to hope they felt as non-exclusionary to others as they felt to me, but I just… don’t know.
We’ll start with Alistair, because he is a Classic of the genre.
A recent addition to the pantheon (because her original incarnation really wasn’t) is Adora out of being She-Ra.
Next up (no picture because books don’t always have them (ruuuuude)) – Stephen, the titular paladin from Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher.
And another lady-doofus – Gideon out of Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir.
In a somewhat more borderline case – Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson, out of Discworld.
Looping back to some nostalgia telly now – Buffy, what is the Vampire Slayer.
This one was… difficult to rate.
Only a novella, but hey, I’m dragging myself back into reading things, so I’ll take what works. I can’t actually remember who made me aware of this one, but I bought it on a whim a month or so ago, and I’m glad I did… although I didn’t wholeheartedly love it.
It has been over a month since my last blog post. This is not because I’m running behind – for once – as I’m typing this the day I finished my next book. This… only tends to happen when I’m deeply uninspired to read (looking at you The Dark Forest). And obviously this time it might also be circumstances, but “uninspired” does not give you an inaccurate portrait of my feelings on The Ten Thousand Doors of January. Incomplete, perhaps. But not inaccurate.
And so, inauspiciously, I begin the Nebula novel nominee read.
This is a post for people who’ve already read the book, without question. But it’s also not really a post for anyone at all, except myself. If you’re interested in my more general thoughts, I posted about it when I finished it the first time, 
A Reader of Else 