Thursday, November 18, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Paladin's Hope by T Kingfisher

 


Paladin's Hope is the third book in T Kingfisher's (also known as kid's author Ursula Vernon) Saint of Steel Fantasy Romance series, with each book featuring one of seven berserker paladins who lost their god a few years prior to the series, and thus lost a guiding force in their lives.  The series is set in Kingfisher's World of the White Rat, which began with her Clocktaur Wars duology and continued with Swordheart, but requires absolutely no knowledge of those books to enjoy - each book in the series is largely stand-alone, although the books do build upon one another, as it follows a single paladin on a romantic adventure that will eventually wind up with them well...happily ever after in love.  Oh yeah, and because it's T Kingfisher, there are a bunch of horrifying things involved, like corpses with murderous clay pots for heads, the most horrifying rabbit ever, etc.  But in all seriousness, the series is just incredibly fun as the paladins are often hilarious and incredibly relatable in their various romances.  

Paladin's Hope is the shortest installment in the series, but as usual for Kingfisher, it is stuffed full of content - you have a really fun M-M romance between a Paladin and a Coroner, you have some hilarious dialogue and really enjoyable side characters, and you also have some serious themes about fighting against prejudice and police corruption/brutality.  It's tremendously well done, often incredibly quotable, and everything I love about Kingfisher novels - heartwarming, romantic, and serious all at once.  It's probably not my favorite of this series....but that's only because of how much book 1's romance really spoke to me personally, and little to do with any fault of this book.  

More after the jump:
----------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------------
When Doctor Piper was called by a Guard Captain, a Gnoll Guard, and two Paladins to the site of a very damaged corpse by the water, he figured he'd just be doing his job as one of lich-doctors (coroners) in Archenhold and establishing particulars about the death.  And when the Guard Captain refuses to believe there's much more to the death, such as a connection to another set of dead bodies with gruesome but different injuries - that's the end of it.  But the gnoll guard, Earstripe, strongly smells there to be a connection, and gets one of the paladins, a way too handsome red haired man named Galen to bring Piper along on a quest for some answers.  And for Piper, Galen is incredibly distracting...in all the most tempting ways.  

Galen has always liked men, and is certainly willing to have a tryst here or there, but that's the most he'll ever allow himself - after all, as a paladin of the now dead Saint of Steel, there is always the possibility he will fly into a berserker rage, and hurt or kill anyone around him...lover or no.  Especially when Galen once had the habit of flying into such a rage whenever someone woke him from one of his nightmares.  But Piper is just soooo there, and tempting, and as Galen gets to know the lich doctor, he finds himself drawn to this self-depreciating, incredibly caring, incredibly capable, and all too handsome man.  

But when the two of them and Earstripe find themselves caught in an ancient death trap, they'll be forced to work together intimately...and their attraction will become too difficult to ignore...assuming the death trap doesn't kill them all first.  
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Paladin's Hope is nearly everything you hope for in this series* - you have Kingfisher's incredibly fun dialogue and scenes; a world filled with humans and gnolls and wonderworkers and Ancient leftover technology that is highly deadly; and of course two lead characters who are incredibly easy to root for to get together in romance.  The book even takes less than the usual amount of time of the characters pining for one another, not believing the other could feel anything for the other, before they finally kiss and boink.  But Paladin's Hope does a lot more than just provide a great M-M romance - it deals with some real serious themes of police corruption - and misuse of jails and imprisonment - and the struggle for progress and reform all at the same time.   

*Well, if you were hoping for descriptive sex scenes like we got in Paladin's Grace in the church, you'll be disappointed - but that's not why you likely are reading this series.*

Which doesn't detract from the romance - the first M-M romance of the series (or really that I think Kingfisher has ever featured in any books I've seen), which is very very good.  Galen will be familiar to readers of other books in this series to some extent - he's your classic guilty paladin you've seen from this series.  He suffers from nightmares of what he did when the god died and he went berserk as well as a tendency to hurt people, if not go all out berserk again, who try to touch him to wake him from those nightmares.  And so he doesn't really feel he deserves anything as a result, even if he's certainly been willing to have occasional trysts (as long as those trysts don't result in the him and a lover trying to spend the night in the same bed sleeping). 

And then you have Piper, a coroner with a magical gift he keeps secret because some people think badly of it (he sees the last moments of dead people he touches).  Piper became a coroner because he couldn't deal with the feelings and wants of living people, but still suffers because of what his gift makes him relive resulting in drinking in misery at times - and like Galen, he also doesn't really think himself worthy of love or that he's worthy as a doctor given how he only works on the dead.  And he constantly self-depreciates his own worth to others. 

And so when the two of them feel obvious physical attraction for one another, and find themselves later attracted to each others' personalities - for Galen, that's Piper's caring, his competence, and his willingness to do the right thing; for Piper, that's Galen's heroism, and his willingness to fight and understand for his gnoll friends.  And since Piper has seen so many deaths through his magic, he's not afraid of the deaths that trouble Galen's conscience, or Galen's danger.  It makes the two perfect for one another, and Kingfisher writes them both with tremendous chemistry.  It's a great romance for the most part.

But that's not all we get here, as a major element of this book from the beginning, which comes to the forefront in the last act, is the issue of police corruption, police prejudice, and the evils of jails and imprisonment when combined with it all.  In amazing descriptive sequence early in the book, we learn that Bishop Beartongue of the White Rat came up with a scheme (which has to be read to be believed in its brilliance) to have independent record keepers of the jails and arrests of the City Guard, after a few too many people wound up being "forgotten about in jail".  The result knocks out a major source of private income from the guard, who were using their powers of arrest and lack of bookkeeping to extort people such that those without money would be stuck in jail, with even the well-meaning Captain Mallory finding a way to excuse it - and results in the Guard not only being angry at the Rat, but several Guard members quitting in protest.  

And then you have the case of Earstripe, the gnoll guard, who became a guard to try and improve the Guard's treatment of gnolls (calling to mind calls of improving the police through minority hires), only to find himself ignored, the guard unwilling to change, and the guard responding to being proven wrong incredibly poorly.  It takes all our heroes' best efforts (and the efforts of some nice allies) to try to help him, and even all of that results in no serious change occurring - just the Guard cannibalizing itself to spare itself from embarrassment.  I don't want to spoil much more - I already have spoiled too much, but this plot is done really well and the themes hit hard in terms of their relevance today, taking this novel from just another great "fluffy" romance novel to another level.  

Really my only actual complaint about this novel is that I'm getting a bit tired of the romance plot structure where our protagonists finally get together, then the Paladin feels guilty and feels that he isn't worthy and will put the other in danger, and so he pulls away, resulting in the two being miserable while estranged for a bit before fate forces them back together.  We saw that also in book 1, and yeah It's a bit annoying.  On the other hand, this is a Paladin romance series, so it's not like I should expect much different, really?  I should probably be more surprised when this DOESNT occur in one of these books.  

So Yeah, Paladin's Hope is great great fantasy romance.  Unless you don't like romance, you should be reading this series.  

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