I Didn't Finish "Paladin's Grace" by T. Kingfisher

I take it back, Stephanie Meyer, please write more books, I'm so sorry about making fun of you, please save me from this bland tripe.

I swear to god if I have to read another genre fantasy novel with Whedonisms and ‘uhh, can I get that in English, doc?’ banter I’m going to put a gun barrel in my mouth.

This book starts off with a strong premise — paladins of the Saint of Steel, demon hunters and berserker warriors, suddenly one day feel their god vanish from their lives. It’s treated as a traumatic event, horrifying and devastating all of his disciples as they clutch at their chests and wail about the presence they can no longer feel, and then we cut years ahead to the aftermath. Stephen, now having lost most of his brethren to suicide or being violently put down, putters aimlessly in a monastery for a different god, bored and lost but given just enough purpose to keep moving.

The fact that no one says ‘depression’ is a welcome delight, because it means this fantasy world still doesn’t grasp the full spectrum of sanity, sparing us from the author directly speaking to the reader about mental health. There’s good worldbuilding in here, as you push your fingers against the way all these gods and their followers intermingle, and the complex political stage that chugs in the background.

But then the story actually gets started, as perfumer Grace has a meet-cute with Stephen, and they laugh and smile and make light contact, and both go to their respective homes where their closest friends immediately put together what happened and push them to meet again. And it’s about this time that you slowly realize you did not buy a fantasy novel — you are reading Garden State: 1654 AD.

Everything about this book beyond the pitch repulsed me, but I’m still as of writing this reeling at the total disregard of the human and political ramifications of a god that grants holy power to clerics and paladins dying. It basically gets dropped immediately. Dozens to hundreds of men and women killed themselves out of grief, some went insane and had to be murdered, and yet when Grace meets Stephen, while he’s wearing the colors, she feels no concern or fear at all. Stephen equally doesn’t seem to be grief-stricken, despite the depression we started the story with. He’s laughing, smiling, telling jokes, which makes me ask, so what was the point of any of this?

I’m sure it comes back later in the plot, but the utter apathy to broader ramifications staggers me. Did we really set up the trauma and social stigma just so we could have buff Zack Braff look sad? Shouldn’t he be more of a dickhead if he was abandoned by his divine patron? I’m not asking for Ursula Vernon to write Between Two Fires (yes I am, I’d have liked it more) but shouldn’t he at least be a little bit of a prick to people? The book even details his impulsive battle rages, a thing the world knows about, but no one is scared of him at all, not even the socialites, the love interest, or her best friend? He’s not even scared of himself, or of letting people get close to him? What’s the point exactly?

The refrain I got on Bluesky when I said this was to adjust my expectations — it’s not really a Buehlman book (again, you’d be a lot better if you were), it’s more like a romantic comedy and I should think about it in those terms. I’m not the one who put paladins experiencing a collective episode of trauma as the opener to my fantasy novel, but fine, let’s play in your ballpark a second.

I really loved Silver Metal Lover, and the main reason was because Tanith Lee treated her romantic-tragedy with the drama it required. Jane is sixteen and Silver is not human — both of these aspects are treated with the seriousness it required. The book spends the first half at least leaving you in the ambiguous mind of a teenage girl with her first boyfriend, all the insecurity and messiness of learning independence and struggling with literally fucking a walking sex toy that can play the guitar that she legally owns. The book tells you what she’s thinking and lets her act like a stupid reckless kid — which she is.

It does not, at any point, have her snarking to herself in her internal monologues about how incredibly normal it is to be having sex with an android, nor does it have Silver himself mutter awkwardly about how “I do interior decorating, sometimes. Mostly curtains. I’m an interior decorating guy. Person. Thing.” Because it would be really fucking weird, and break the spell the story has over you to do some cheap gags. If you aren’t treating the story with any kind of gravity because your characters aren’t, then I don’t have to either.

To bring it back to my original point, how much can I really root for Stephen, a tragic victim of fate, to be his best self if the story starts and the book is desperate to tell me he’s just a great guy and no one is scared of him? It feels like this is somehow downriver from the years of Twilight criticism — if he was a bad guy, it might tell some little girl somewhere that it’s okay when a man is a dickhead to you so long as he has pretty eyes and you see the good in him, so we can’t do that. So instead, let’s just slash open all the flaws or friction from our characters and get the plot moving so that under no circumstances is there any kind of tension between them at all other than the ‘will they won’t they.’

Grace is allowed to be flawed of course, but only in predictably juvenile ways. She’s in her own head too much, she’s deeply insecure about her appearance, she had an acrimonious divorce, she’s bad in crowds, etc etc etc. It’s good to know that in the aftermath of Fifty Shades of Grey, everyone learned the wrong lesson and made the male characters uninterestingly bland while keeping the clumsy, swooning catastrophe love interests.

As for being a comedy, well,

Yeah, not looking very good on that front either. Not capable of Pratchett’s silliness and not confident enough to hit Lee’s melodrama, we instead find ourselves padding for time while firing webcomic dialogue in hopes of keeping you interested. I’m punching out of this book before I end up stumbling across a compound insult like ‘shitbucket.’

I’m sure someone might cry foul at this, “Oh you only got a quarter of the way in! She gets better as a character! The plot is interesting!” And sure, it probably is, but I’m not tunneling through more meet-cutes and Grace’s internal monologues another second just to find out why the Saint of Steel died. I don’t really care.