have a book rec?
Jun. 27th, 2023 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cathyw I've actually finished some things, my goodness.
The Saint of Steel series, by T. Kingfisher (I read the first one about a year ago, but I just recently finished the second and third.)
Imagine you're a paladin. You're a tool in your god's hand. And then your god... died? can they even do that? and since you weren't fortunate enough to die along with him like most of your brethren, you have a god-shaped hole in your being.
Now what?
Seven paladins of the Saint of Steel - berserkers, who were guided by their god to attack only the guilty and spare the innocent - have ended up in the service of the White Rat, a god whose clergy are tasked with solving the problems of the urban poor. Since the Rat doesn't call paladins (not a lot of holy righteous battling with swords to be done - instead, he calls lawyers) they were happy to have a few on hand for the occasions when a large man with a sword is, in fact, just what the problem calls for.
Like when a corpse with no head turns up in an alley alongside the severed head of a completely different person, and the city guards are flummoxed.
This is, believe it or not, the setup to a series of romance novels. (Apparently the third book is not the end, and one assumes there will be seven novels for seven paladins.) They're just... romance novels with a certain amount of horror attached. And broken paladins are still paladins, so there is a certain amount of Guilt and Self-Flagellation involved. :)
So far, for what it's worth, we have M/F, M/F (non-human), and M/M pairings in the three books, and they avoid most of the things I hate about romance novels by using alternating POVs. On AO3, I would rate them "M" for smutty content, and I would definitely tag the first two for body horror but it is, for the most part, creepy rather than gross. The third one is... kind of a dungeon crawl? that somehow reminded me of Ursula Vernon's (as you may know, T. Kingfisher is her secret identity) fascination with slime molds, despite there being no slime mold anywhere near the dungeon in question. It also featured the first character I recall running across whose pronouns were "our/ours" but was not plural.
They are set in the same world as The Clocktaur Wars, for what it's worth, apparently about 15-20 years later?
And the White Rat has got to be one of my all-time favorite fictional gods. Very practical. And the idea of calling lawyers instead of paladins just tickles me.
The Saint of Steel series, by T. Kingfisher (I read the first one about a year ago, but I just recently finished the second and third.)
Imagine you're a paladin. You're a tool in your god's hand. And then your god... died? can they even do that? and since you weren't fortunate enough to die along with him like most of your brethren, you have a god-shaped hole in your being.
Now what?
Seven paladins of the Saint of Steel - berserkers, who were guided by their god to attack only the guilty and spare the innocent - have ended up in the service of the White Rat, a god whose clergy are tasked with solving the problems of the urban poor. Since the Rat doesn't call paladins (not a lot of holy righteous battling with swords to be done - instead, he calls lawyers) they were happy to have a few on hand for the occasions when a large man with a sword is, in fact, just what the problem calls for.
Like when a corpse with no head turns up in an alley alongside the severed head of a completely different person, and the city guards are flummoxed.
This is, believe it or not, the setup to a series of romance novels. (Apparently the third book is not the end, and one assumes there will be seven novels for seven paladins.) They're just... romance novels with a certain amount of horror attached. And broken paladins are still paladins, so there is a certain amount of Guilt and Self-Flagellation involved. :)
So far, for what it's worth, we have M/F, M/F (non-human), and M/M pairings in the three books, and they avoid most of the things I hate about romance novels by using alternating POVs. On AO3, I would rate them "M" for smutty content, and I would definitely tag the first two for body horror but it is, for the most part, creepy rather than gross. The third one is... kind of a dungeon crawl? that somehow reminded me of Ursula Vernon's (as you may know, T. Kingfisher is her secret identity) fascination with slime molds, despite there being no slime mold anywhere near the dungeon in question. It also featured the first character I recall running across whose pronouns were "our/ours" but was not plural.
They are set in the same world as The Clocktaur Wars, for what it's worth, apparently about 15-20 years later?
And the White Rat has got to be one of my all-time favorite fictional gods. Very practical. And the idea of calling lawyers instead of paladins just tickles me.
