Review by ladylunabee - Paladin's Grace

ladylunabee 's review for:

Paladin's Grace by T. Kingfisher

4.0

adventurous emotional funny inspiring mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I'll start with this: I loved the two main characters. I loved that they were two fully grown adults with a healthy level of awkwardness and were just trying to figure out what they were doing and how to move forward through life. I fell in love with this story because of them. It was refreshing to have a story about these kinds of realistic characters.

But from the beginning, I was so ready to give this book 5 stars. I flew threw the first 60% because of how much I was loving this story and these characters and this world. Then a couple things happened in quick succession. The characters very noticeably got in their own way (in a way that felt it was only serving the plot, kind of like a bad third act break up in a romance novel when the characters go stupid just for the sake of having the third act breakup). And then

Grace got arrested.

And to me, it felt like this derailed the entire story. It wasn't something that I was expecting to happen. And most of the time I would say that's a good thing in a story, but this time it made me put the book down for a couple weeks because it was so jarring to me.

And then I made it to the acknowledgements, and the 60%-onward bit was the entire point of the story. Which, okay, fine. I eventually got over it and accepted it to continue reading the story. I wanted whatever payoff the story was going to give me. But the end was so quick, and very convenient.

Were there clues as to what was building in the story and where it was going? Yeah, looking back I can see them, but they were very subtle to me. Subtle in the way that I almost feel like I'm making them clues, and that they really could have led towards anything.

I like this world enough to at least continue with the next book in this series, because there is an ongoing plot that didn't get resolved in this first book. But this book barely scraped a 4 stars. And it did so mostly because I really did love these characters and the world.

Content Warnings