Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher

Narrated by Joel Richards

One of my Twitter friends recently recommended this series to me, so I was delighted to see book one Paladin’s Grace was coming out on audio. What a delight! The narration is fantastic and the story is so much fun, full of wonderfully wry humour, authentic characters and a very sweet romance. There’s a little bit of steam too – plenty for the romance fan to enjoy.

Stephen is a Paladin of the Saint of Steel. Notwithstanding the name, the Saint is a god. Or, I should say, was. Three years before the book begins, the Saint suddenly died. The kind of paladins the Saint called were berserkers, but the Saint protected them from hurting innocents. The “Black Tide” would come over them and they’d be almost unstoppable in battle. When the god died, that protection also failed. The sheer suddenness of it also meant that the berserker rage happened in less-than-ideal circumstances and innocents were harmed and killed.

The Temple of the White Rat, a church who look after people, provide services and lawyers and food and aid to people in need, took in the paladins, not having any of their own. Stephen and his 6 remaining brothers and sisters now all serve the Rat. When the book starts it is only service and duty which gets Stephen out of bed. He has no enjoyment for life. His soul was crushed when his god died and he’s basically waiting to die, fulfilling his debt to the Rat until then.

And then he meets Grace Angelica, a perfumer in Archenhold and everything changes.

Grace is trying to establish herself in the city, having arrived shortly after the Saint of Steel died. She’s slowly building up a clientele and while not exactly passing herself off as a Master Perfumer, she’s not advertising that her articles of apprenticeship are still held by her former husband. Grace has lost everything many times and is reluctant to believe she can hold on to happiness and in that way, she and Stephen have much in common.

Stephen and Grace have an instant attraction, but each is rather shy and does not expect the other to be interested. Ordinarily this would probably frustrate me but there was so much else going on and Stephen and Grace were so darn sweet that it was only an infrequent and mild annoyance.

Stephen and Grace foil a very bad assassination attempt at the palace and this leads to an investigation by the Temple of the Rat to find out what’s going on – it seems like the attempt was supposed to fail and why would that be? In addition, someone is cutting off people’s heads in the city and that’s obviously not great either.

I won’t spoil the rest of the story – it’s too much fun listening to it unfold and it’s too complicated to explain in any great detail (but not at all difficult to understand).

Stephen’s fellow paladins, particularly, Shane, Galen and Istvhan are also essential to the story and their banter and particular worldview are both poignant (when it comes to the trauma of their god dying) and funny; the scene early on where Shane, Istvhan and Stephen were looking around the palace and judging the efficiency of various objects to use as weapons should it become necessary is just one example (the swan ice sculpture was considered most seriously).

The friendship between Grace and Marguerite, a spy for a neighbouring city and also Grace’s landlord (who keeps a better secret than a perfumer?) was also fun to listen to.

I liked that the characters were older (Stephen is 37) and not necessarily traditionally beautiful. I liked the representation of diverse sexuality and gender that was effortlessly spread through the story and not at all a topic of debate.

The narration was wonderful. I think this is my first experience with Joel Richards performing, although his voice did sound somewhat familiar. His female character voices were softer, slightly lighter in tone without ever straying into falsetto territory. His delivery was superb – both the pathos and the humour. Some of the parts where Stephen was thinking or talking, either to Grace or to one of the other paladins for example, were really sad. Mr. Richards let the text speak for itself, not overplaying the lines and giving them that much more power because of it. But the humour is where he truly shone. The comedy is dry and wry and it is as much about how it is delivered as what is being said on audio. I spent much of the listen with a delighted smile on my face or outright laughing (“At the bottom of the stairs, the guard had discovered that he had a broken leg and seemed to be very upset about it.”). While he doesn’t sound at all like Grover Gardner, I think those who enjoy Mr. Gardner’s narrations will feel similarly about Mr. Richards’ – there’s a similar vibe.

Ultimately Stephen and Grace were two slightly broken people who found each other and in doing so found they’re able to mend a bit more than they thought possible. I liked their non-traditional HEA (it is very much a HEA though – I promise!) which fit their characters perfectly. I was engrossed in the adventure and politics of the tale as well as the developing romance.

I raced through this listen because I was enjoying it so much. This is my first T. Kingfisher book but I’m already reading the second book in this series (Paladin’s Strength) which is Istvhan’s book and I’m definitely going to be hunting down her backlist (which seems large so extra yay!). And, though he doesn’t appear to have narrated many romance titles (alas) I’ll also be looking for more from Joel Richards too.

Kaetrin

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Buy Paladin's Grace by T. Kingfisher on Amazon