Swordheart by T. Kingfisher

Swordheart
by T. Kingfisher
2018

This is delightful and hilarious and a surprisingly quick read despite being fairly long. The story pulled me along as the plot goes on wild side-quests and the main character goes on wild tangents. I adore the main character, Halla, a housekeeper who had come into an unexpected inheritance that involves some really angry dis-inherited relatives that she has to avoid. She was happily living her life, more or less, and would have continued to do so if not for the need to avoid the awful relatives which has led to acquiring a magically haunted sword, running away from home, meeting bandits on the road and having to escape them, meeting police chasing the bandits on the road and having to escape them, and increasing number of hijinks that domino ever onwards.

The second main character, Sarkis, is the magically haunted sword and also a barbarian from a distant land, who is used to being used as a warrior by other warriors, and is now a companion for an escaping housekeeper and isn’t quite sure what to make of the situation. We slowly get more of his backstory over the course of the book, but (in my opinion) his true delight is to be the outside perspective on Halla and her situation. It’s hilarious!

I was also pleased to see confirmation in the afterward that this was going to be a trilogy. Since it was published in 2018, I assumed the other two would already be available. Alas! Book 2 of the trilogy is due to be published in August 2026. Hmph. I will wait.

I also realized about a quarter of the way in that Swordheart is set in the same universe as the author’s Saint of Steel series, of which I have read the first three of four:

Paladin’s Grace (Saint of Steel, Book 1)
2020

It’s actually only as I was putting together this review that I realize from the publication dates involved that these books were written after Swordheart, and thus these are in the Swordheart universe rather than vice versa. I had read a great essay about the social history of perfume and how closely perfumers were tied to alchemists and to poisoners and someone had recommend this book in the comments and it really is fabulous. Set in a generic historic fantasy setting with gods and demons and paladins, our main character Grace is a perfumer trying to make a living, but having to fight systemic sexism every step of the way. And also accusations of being a poisoner. Meanwhile, the main male character is a paladin’s who’s god has since died and thus his own status is deeply in question. I really enjoyed the deep dive into the perfuming business as well as the interesting theological perspective. After I read it, I immediately put a hold on the remaining books in the series:

Paladin’s Strength (Saint of Steel, Book 2)
2021

Paladin’s Grace had introduced four paladin’s who had survived the death of their god, and there was a book for each of them to figure out how to continue living when the religion they had devoted themselves to was so thoroughly disbanded. This is the second book and continues to do some amazing world-building on what religions there are and how they interact with one another and with their gods and I do love a deep dive into fantasy theology.

Paladin’s Hope (Saint of Steel, Book 3)
2021

This is the third book in the series and I probably should have taken a break rather than reading one book after another because I remember liking it well enough, but just loosing some steam in reading them back-to-back-to-back. I really love Kingfisher’s characters and world-building, but this book focused more on the overarching series plot of a massive villain in the background who must be routed out before they destroyed all of society or something like that and I just didn’t find it as interesting.

I’m pretty sure the reason I didn’t review these here before was because I’d been planning to review the whole series in one go but then didn’t get around to reading the final book: Paladin’s Faith. However, I’ve gone ahead and put a hold on that at my local library and plan to read it in preparation for Daggerbound being published in August 2026.

Someone You Can Build A Nest In by John Wiswell

Oct26 by Rebecca

Someone You Can Build A Nest In
by John Wiswell
2024

This book is very cute and very gross. It’s a remarkably sweet romance between a literal man-eating shapeshifting ooze and a member of a monster-hunting human family. The story is set in a hand-wavy historical fantasy setting mostly in and around one town but with knights and nobles and small kingdom politics happening in the background. In the opening scene, the monster Shesheshen wakes up from hibernation when a hunter enters her lair in order to kill her and harvest her heart. Instead, she kills and eats him, not necessarily in that order. Later on, she meets his sister Homily and falls in love. There are, as you can imagine, some problems that must be resolved for any relationship to work out.

The plot is tricksy with a couple of twists and turns that kept my anticipation high. It also side-stepped a lot of issues by having a main character who was so very inhuman that she, and thus to a certain extent the reader, just didn’t care about the ongoing body horror. It’s not horror to the point-of-view character so everything is fine!

I enjoyed the book and thought it was both fun and funny.

However, I do have some caveats:

One of them is oddly how sanitized the story is. Of course there is a lot of death and killing, but I was a bit taken aback by how few people Shesheshen actually winds up killing, despite her stream of conscious thought process that classifies people as highly edible. (Her thought process is hilarious!) Given that the author is upfront about monsters often being a metaphor for disability, it makes sense that he wrote a more misunderstood monster than a truly vicious one, but it also felt like he was trying to write both at the same time and couldn’t quite manage to reconcile the thought process with the actions so it doesn’t quite work out.

While the expectation of death and gore is obvious from the very beginning, there was a scene of extreme animal harm in the middle of the book that surprised me and broke the rhythm of the story for me. Spoiler: the animal does get rescued and does survive, but it’s an unpleasant scene that hit me harder than anything else in the book.

And finally, I think this book could have done better as a duology. The book is broken into eight parts and takes place over the course of a full year. The main plot and primary character arcs and half the year are covered in the first seven parts. The eighth section covers the other half of the year and a whole secondary character arc that gets skimmed through extremely quickly. It could have been a whole sequel, possibly from Homily’s perspective, but it felt very rushed as a too-long epilog to the main story.

But overall, this book was fun and enjoyable and a great build-up to Halloween.

Web comics

Apr28 by Rebecca

I have been bingeing so many web comics! There are so many, and cover such a range! And I know I’ve read web comics before and even recommended some of them on this blog, but previously I was discovering them on their individual websites and now I have discovered that there are phone apps that give you access to some untold numbers of web comics all through a single searchable interface.

Admittedly, the vast majority are pretty darn schlocky, and my first impression was that they were like harlequin romances for fantasy fans. (“His Majesty’s Proposal”, “The Remarried Empress”, and “Justice for the Villainess” are all real titles of webcomics I’ve tried.) But on the one hand, I do enjoy some schlocky fantasy romances, and on the other hand, there are other genres represented, and some really good stories, as long as you’re willing to go searching.

Many of the stories are on-going with weekly updates which remind me of why I stopped following comics in individual issues and waited for trade paperbacks instead. I find the individual updates frustratingly short. But having just discovered these collections, there are a lot of issues to catch up on before I’m current, and there are some great stories that have been completed.

Manta is one of the apps I downloaded on my phone, although it’s also available as a website. I now have a monthly subscription that gives me full access to any story in their collection. Some of the completed stories that I recommend are:

Shall We Pole Dance? is a 12-issue nonfiction story about a woman’s experience improving physically and mentally through joining a pole dancing class, that’s just sweet and delightful.
The Night Market is a 12-issue fantasy story about a magical market that is an intersection of worlds, where you can buy anything at all, but once you enter, you must buy something, and everything has a cost.
Unbreakable Master is a 141-issue fantasy gay romance about a guy who breaks everything he touches discovering that there is a hidden world of magical beings fighting a war for control of the world, and what role his powers might have in this struggle.
Traces of the Sun is a 96-issue fantasy gay romance about a guy who has the magical power to fix things, a job fixing destroyed buildings, and a secret: that when his childhood friends were killed in an attack, he tried to fix them, but only raised them as zombies that he can neither bring fully to life nor settle into peace. (This is based on a book and I want to read the book so bad, but it’s in Korean and there’s no translation available.)

Webtoons is the other app I now have installed on my phone, which charges a certain number of “coins” per recent issue, with coins being sold for real money, however, as long as you’re willing to wait a few weeks, the backlog of older issues are free. None of the stories I’ve read on this app have been completed, but there are several that I’ve enjoyed the backlog and updates for:

Eleceed is currently at 262 free issues of a fantasy adventure story about a kid who has a superpower discovering that there’s a whole society of “awakened ones” with superpowers and working up the ranks of power via an endless series of dramatic duels, which is a tedious premise, but the growing cast of characters are so darn delightful! The sweet kid, Jiwoo Seo, discovers an injured cat, who is actually a person, Kayden, who had semi-accidentally transformed himself into a cat, but proceeds to mentor the kid. This story made me realize that for a society that’s essentially lawful evil, the chaotic neutral of Kayden is a net benefit.
Cleric of Decay is currently at 30 free issues of a fantasy adventure story where our protagonist has been sucked into a video game he was playing, but only after he’d both selected a particularly difficult/weak character class AND installed cheat codes to make it viable. So now he’s wandering around as the last living cleric of an evil goddess who was killed and dismembered years ago trying to collect objects of power at the demand of a mummified hand of a goddess while staying unnoticed by the various paladins and clerics of more accepted deities.
Paranoid Mage is currently at 11 free issues of a fantasy adventure story about a young man who discovers he has magic powers shortly before being discovered by a secret society of magic users who are strictly hierarchical and do not think he is allowed to opt out of joining their society on a low rung. He escapes, and is now on the run/in hiding, while trying to learn to use his powers, and also stumbling across parts of magical society.

These stories are a delight and an addiction.

Ruined by Vaughn, Searle, and Smith

Feb14 by Rebecca

Ruined
written by Sarah Vaughn
pencils and colors by Sarah Winifred Searle
inks by Niki Smith
2023

This is a regency romance graphic novel and it’s delightful and well-done and extremely fictionalized. It’s not so much set in the British regency era as it is in the universe of the Bridgerton TV show, not explicitly but pretty obviously, as it mostly maintains the fashions of the historical era while ignoring the social and political issues.

In this universe there is no racism or homophobia. Sexism is alive and well in the systemic way that drives so many romance novel plots, especially arranged marriage ones such as this one, but not in the individual way. Systemic classism is also highly present but largely ignored. If this book had been trying to be historical fiction, it would be a failure, but as a romance with aesthetic, it’s a delight.

Our heroine has been compromised! She must marry immediately in order to avoid a terrible scandal! Our hero has inherited an estate that’s in terrible repair and near bankruptcy! He must marry for money! They must give up all hope of a love match and have an arranged marriage!

The story opens at their wedding, and then they proceed to get to know each other and fall in love. There’s also a number of secondary characters with at least two other couples who get together with their own intersecting shenanigans. The book is very cute, beautifully illustrated and everyone makes ridiculous decisions regarding their love lives. It’s also got a couple of explicit sex scenes, which are very much part of the story and character arcs, but were surprising to me since otherwise the story telling feels very general audience and open to all ages.

A Market of Dreams and Destiny

Dec28 by Anna

By Trip Galey

This novel is set in a fantasy version of Victorian England, where one of our protagonists is an indentured servant in a mundane workhouse and the other is indentured in the underground fae market. The two meet by coincidence (or grand design?) and in addition to an instant attraction, seem to also possess skills and access to help the other toward freedom.

Author Galey does an incredibly good job of weaving together the dual goals that sometimes align and sometimes not, as well an immersive world balancing realistic and fantasy elements. He uses the same mirroring to reflect on the many different ways that the poor and working class are exploited by the wealthy, and how whole systems of society are built on exploitation.

The strong plot element and theme of workers’ rights and community mutual aid felt both contemporaneously Dickensian and very timely for 2023 (and hopefully 2024). It also created high stakes for the various plots and schemes that kept me on the edge of my seat for most of the book. At times I clung to the fact that I’d seen it recommended on a romance forum in hopes for a happy ending. (Minor spoiler: though serious sacrifices are made, the final resolution falls into place immensely satisfyingly.)

Christmas Stories

Dec23 by Anna

As I get older, I find I have to work a little harder to generate a holiday spirit among all the daily life stressors and nonsense, so I like to gear up with some seasonal reads:

The Haunting Season: Eight Ghostly Tales for Long Winter Nights

I bought this because it includes a Natasha Pulley story about Keita and Thaniel from her Watchmaker of Filigree Street series, which I adore. The general reader reviews are mixed, with many readers saying that Pulley’s story was the weakest since it doesn’t stand alone if you aren’t familiar with the characters. Being well familiar with the characters, though, my experience was the opposite: I very much enjoyed Pulley’s story, always happy to get more of Keita and Thaniel, but was disappointed in the other stories.

Perhaps it was because I was already familiar with Pulley’s characters, but they were the only ones that I actually liked. Most of the other stories featured either selfish or delusional characters, I suppose to ‘justify’ the hauntings one way or another? The plots also seemed overly complicated and obtuse, so each story ended just as I felt like I was starting to get a feel for it.

Sentenced to Christmas

By Marshall Thornton

Marshall Thornton writes the most ridiculous rom-com and cozy mystery plots featuring a cast of hilarious dirtbag characters, and I get a real kick out of his books. As befits the title, the plot of this book is absolutely ridiculous: arrested for burning down the patriotic Christmas tree in front of a conservative talk radio station, our protagonist Gage is sentenced by a crackpot judge to spend Christmas with the prosecuting assistant district attorney (his own defense attorney being Jewish) in order to “learn the true meaning of Christmas.”

The thing about Thornton, though, is that his dirtbag characters then often react with more realistic cranky befuddlement, and it is consistently laugh-out-loud funny. Only one thing stops me from wholeheartedly recommending this: Gage’s friend and assistant is introduced as non-binary, and that being a point of contention with their family, especially around the holidays. Unfortunately, Thornton presumably forgot, and uses she/her pronouns for them for a chunk of the middle of the book. I am confident that it is an unintentional writing error, and amazon reviews mention that some editorial errors have been fixed, so hopefully this is no longer a caveat.

By The Book

Jul24 by Anna

By Jasmine Guillory

I had known that this was a modern day retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but hadn’t realized that it was explicitly Disney, like from a Disney imprint. I’m not a Disney adult (I wasn’t even that much of a Disney kid), so even the relatively subtle allusions to Mrs. Potts and Lumière made me roll my eyes. Despite myself, though, I found myself charmed—Guillory’s skill with characters kept me wanting to know what happened next.

Protagonist Isabelle (goes by Izzy, not Belle) is working in her first career job as an editorial assistant at Tale as Old as Time publishing house (sigh), and facing the disillusionment with her dreams that I assume most of us do in our mid-20s. In a somewhat desperate (and tipsy) attempt to gain favor with her harsh boss and to rekindle her passion for publishing, she offers to coax a much belated manuscript out of child-actor-turned-messy-adult, Beau.

Beau, of course, lives in a beautiful, huge house with extended gardens (and essential large library) in semi-isolation as he struggles with severe writer’s block. He is rude and somewhat mocking to Izzy at first, but nothing egregious. It’s a tricky thing to write a “beast” who is sufficiently off-putting but not abusive, and I don’t have any solutions to that, but Beau felt mild enough that I struggled to fully empathize with Izzy’s antagonism. He seemed like kind of a dick, Izzy on her last thread of patience, and I would have shrugged them both off.

However, once they found a level of friendship working on Beau’s manuscript, I was much more interested in the process by which Izzy talks Beau into overcoming his fear of the blank page, something I assume Guillory has her own vast experience with. Of course, the end got more romantic (though stayed pretty solidly PG with all sex happening off page) and less about the publishing world, so I was less into it, but it did all wrap up very satisfyingly, maybe even a little too pat, though that is to be expected with fairy tales, right?

Uncommon Echoes by Sharon Shinn

Feb13 by Rebecca

echoinonyx Uncommon Echoes
by Sharon Shinn
2019

Echo in Onyx (Book 1)
Echo in Emerald (Book 2)
Echo in Amethyst (Book 3)

I have a somewhat odd perspective on Sharon Shinn because while I really like some of her books and don’t care for others, I am fully aware that it’s a matter of personal preference because I trust her as an author: echoinamethyst I trust that she’s going to write really well and that scenarios and tropes that other authors wouldn’t be able to pull off, she can and does. The quality of her writing is always high, but the tone fluctuates enough that I enjoy some of hers and don’t others. These I really enjoyed.

This particular series is also fascinating because the fantasy element is one I’ve never seen before: that some people have “echoes”, ie physical copies of their bodies that give them an automatic entourage. From a practical standpoint, it’s both impressive and ridiculous unwieldy. Each book is a romance plot set in this relatively generic royal fantasy land during a time of unrest… except that there are added complications of all these extra bodies just hanging around. Each person is their own crowd (at least among the nobility.)

Shinn also does an amazing job of showing how conflicted civil wars are: the current monarchy vs the rebel factions, and there’s significant in-fighting on both sides and sympathetic and idiotic aspects of both sides as well. And I, as the reader, am also conflicted, because both sides are being awful in many ways and both sides of trying to make things better for people in many ways, too.

An amusing aspect is how bad all of the characters are at actual physical fighting. I feel like that’s probably a lot more realistic than a lot of fantasy novels: the high ranked nobles are not used to having to actually defend themselves from physical attack so when it happens, they’re incredibly bad at it.

But as the greater political situation continues to be fraught in a variety of ways, the main characters get their happy endings. And I really needed that.

Note: I read these books about a year ago, and enjoyed them, and was writing this review when the national news broke about another young black man who had been killed by the police. And here I was enjoying fantasy romance about wealthy nobility. And there’s a line between enjoying some escapism versus being disconnected from society, and I felt like I had fallen over that line. Now, a year later, with the constant grinding news cycle, my take away is: enjoy what I can, when I can, but don’t lose track of the work that needs to be done in the real world.

The House in the Cerulean Sea

Dec12 by Kinsey

Just hours after I finished this book and started recommending it to most everyone I know, Alison at Ask a Manager named it her favorite book of the year, so I feel in very good company telling you to read The House in the Cerulean Sea by TK Klune. It is absolutely charming and, look, everyone likes it!

It’s a very simple set-up–Linus Baker is a caseworker who investigates the orphanages that care for, or possibly detain, children with magical abilities. He has a very specific, prescribed job and lives a very specific, prescribed life when he is given a special assignment to check out a house on a small coastal island. And to check out the man who oversees the children there. I would not say that this is a particularly subtle book, but it is done so well you won’t care at all. Even thought I was pretty sure I knew from the beginning where the story was going to go, I still couldn’t put it down. If you’ve ever been on vacation to the beach, you know that feeling when you first get there and you step out of the car and breathe in the wind and salt and see the water stretching out before you? And sort of feel this big exhale of relief and your shoulders drop and you feel a sense of calm settle over you for a minute? That’s how this book made me feel.

And how gorgeous is that title and cover?

Kinsey’s Three-ish Word Review: Harry Potter meets . . . Joe vs. the Volcano?

You might also like: The Ten Thousand Doors of January, as well as Sourdough: or, Lois and Her Adventures in the Underground Market: A Novel. This book also shares a lot of DNA with Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series (I reviewed the first one, Every Heart a Doorway, a few years ago), although I think The House in the Cerulean Sea is a bit sweeter. And I’ll take any opportunity to recommend Jo Walton–in this case, Among Us.

The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary

Sep12 by Rebecca

The Flatshare
by Beth O'Leary
2019

This is sweet and adorable romcom that had me giggling to myself in the living room and then managed to ambush me with some actual serious issues of trauma recovery without ever losing the quirky fun set-up.

The story is about Tiffy, who needs to get a new place to live on very short notice and on a very tight budget, and Leon, who needs to get some extra income and has a one-bedroom flat but works nights at a hospice. The deal is that they will time-share the flat so that Leon sleeps there during the day while Tiffy works, and Tiffy sleeps there during the night while Leon works. Leon has a girlfriend who is more than happy to take up any of his available free time so that Leon and Tiffy never have to meet… That’s the premise.

It reminds me of Attachments by Rainbow Rowell and is very cute and all the characters are quirky and there’s a close friend group on Tiffy’s side and a close family group on Leon’s side, so they each have their own support structures but are also dealing with their own issues outside of their growing relationship with each other.

It switches perspective between Tiffy and Leon, and then is also divided into month segments from February to October. My one real warning for this book is to make sure you have enough time to read October all in one go. I attempted to put the book down and get a night’s sleep in the middle of October and it was an anxiety-ridden night’s sleep.

As Anna pointed out when I was telling her about it, this book is the opposite of a tragedy. The best tragedies all have a moment where everything seems to be working out, where everything could go well, and it gets your hopes up, and then it all comes crashing down and the fall is all the worse for the hope. Well, this is the reverse of that: there is a horrifying terrible moment where everything has the chance to fall apart and go horribly wrong. And it doesn’t. It all works out, but that one moment is just terrifying and the release of tension makes the end so much sweeter.

Biblio-therapy

Category Archives: Romance