blog: Paladin's Grace book review

src/content/blog/2026-04-28-paladins-grace.md

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+---
+title: 'Book review: Paladin''s Grace by T. Kingfisher'
+date: 2026-04-28T20:57:04.448Z
+slug: 2026-04-28-paladins-grace
+author: Thomas Wilson-Cook
+tags:
+  - book-review
+
+---
+Paladin's Grace is a modern fantasy romance book by T. Kingfisher.  It follows Stephen, a Paladin of the Saint of Steel, and Grace, a perfumer.  Not to get ahead of ourselves, but Stephen and Grace sort of have the hots for each other.
+
+I'm glad I read the book.  It's a very low stakes cosy fantasy romance, with a little crime to string the plot together. 
+
+Kingfisher is able to do a lot of world building with very little time spent actually inhabiting the world.  They built a complex the world, and placed a relatively simple story inside of it.
+
+Despite that, the fullness of the world speak to a rich imagination.  This isn't  your Standard Issue fantasy world, but one with relatively unique lowercase-g gods, monsters, and politicking -- there was enough there to make the world breath around the story.  I gave a similar note to Robert Jackson Bennett's *The Tainted Cup*, and I think it balances the need to keep a fantasy novel accessible to newer genre readers, while also remaining engaging to die-hard fantasy nerds.  One peep at a bookshelf in my house will tell you which camp I fall into.
+
+Kingfisher uses glimpses into the wider world like a screen director might use a small cast of extras, or theatre set designer would use cleverly designed lighting, to *imply* an awful lot, without showing it in detail.  It's efficiently done, and also effective. 
+
+The dialogue had wonderful moments, really smirk-while-reading little witty exchanges.  It's driven by characters that you're obviously meant to like from the moment they appear.  It almost feels like a narrative shortcut for making us bond with them.  It works, though -- Kingfisher puts some really lovable characters on the page.  
+
+At time the dialogue felt a bit more "tell" than "show".  It wasn't so much that characters held forth, unbidden, on their world view -- though we do get extra large helping of our male protagonist telling us how dangerous it would be for him to fall in love, and that it's his duty to protect the people he loves to *not* fall in love.  We are told this several times.
+
+And again, the obviously-a-secret-villain character appears out of nowhere, and gets his first proper scene with a main character, where he is sickly kind.  Ten pages later we learn it was all a ruse!  He's actually not nice!  He lied! 
+
+The characters very happily pull along a plot that certainly isn't weighed down by any real threat.  The story is light on peril, as it is with character nuance or grey areas.  But as a reader I know my personal appetite for these latter things is quite high.  Maybe not every book has to bring various human rights violations into the conversation and then ask "but what *if* the ends justified the means?"
+
+I didn't get the impression that narrative complexity was high up on Kingfisher's desired impacts while writing.  Much higher were "feelgood" and "lovable".  
+
+Maybe some stories can just be nice.
+
+I don't see myself rushing to the library for any other books in the *Saint of Steel* series, each following a different paladin in the eponymous saint's order.  Just in case you worried that Stephen and Grace run the risk of any peril after their "happy ever after".
+
+I just don't think this book was written for readers like me (or at least who I am now).  And that's okay!