Review: Swordheart, by T. Kingfisher

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Mon Dec 23 21:02:25 PST 2019


Swordheart
by T. Kingfisher

Publisher: Argyll
Copyright: November 2018
ISBN:      1-61450-463-6
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     417

(Content note: Some discussion of suicide.)

Swordheart is set in the same fantasy world as Clockwork Boys and The
Wonder Engine and a little later than those books, so it contains mild
spoilers for some of their plot. But it's not a sequel, and is quite
readable on its own.

  It was almost exactly a year ago from the time of this writing that
  my husband and I were in the kitchen and I was ranting about how
  much Elric — Michael Moorcock's Elric — whined about everything. "If
  you ask me," I said, "the real victim was his sword Stormbringer.
  The sword had to listen to him whine and couldn't leave. But does
  anybody ever ask the magic sword's opinion? Noooo."

This is from the author's note by T. Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon) at
the end of the book, but I think it's the perfect introduction
(although in this case the sword does more of the whining than the
wielder).

At the start of the book, Halla has inherited a substantial estate.
This is doing her no good, given that she's locked in a room on that
estate by her relatives, whose solution to her unexpected inheritance
of her uncle's property is to try to force her to marry her cousin and
thus hand that inheritance back over to him. The only way Halla sees
out of this situation is to kill herself. Conveniently, there's a large
sword among the clutter in the room in which she's trapped.

To say that the sword disagrees strongly with this plan is an
understatement.

Sarkis is the sword in question. Or, to be more precise, Sarkis is
bound inside the sword in question, summoned whenever the wielder of
the sword draws the blade. He's also bound to protect the wielder of
the sword, built like a tank, and more than capable of defending Halla
against her relatives and their hired guard. Reaching a mutual
agreement on this point with Halla is considerably harder, given their
entirely non-overlapping frames of reference and Halla's uncanny
ability to derail almost any conversation with endless questions.

Escaping Halla's home is the prelude to a quest to get Halla's rightful
inheritance back, one that eventually also entangles a lawyer-priest
and a gnole. It's also the beginning of a romance that readers of The
Wonder Engine will find somewhat familiar. Sarkis is not exactly a
paladin and Halla is nothing like Slate, but the romance follows a
similar halting dynamic with extensive internal monologues (and some
mutual incomprehension). This romance is further complicated by
Sarkis's own secrets.

The romance once again didn't quite work for me. The attraction is
primarily physical at first, and I wasn't sure what Halla sees in
Sarkis. He's not quite as intense on the self-pity as Caliban, but he
has some similar tendencies, and the resolution of his deep secrets
struck me as unnecessarily melodramatic. The romance also has some
irritating periods of the two of them not talking to each other.

The rest of the book, though, is great. Kingfisher's gnoles continue to
delight with their quiet judgment of humans, occasional aphorisms, and
determined ability to stick to gnole business. The plot has a tendency
to roll on the random encounter table from time to time, but it moves
right along, includes some enjoyable twists, and has a satisfying
ending. But the true highlight of the book is Halla.

The first few chapters establish Halla's runaway train of thought,
which leaps from topic to topic and chases odd ideas across the
furniture and down into burrows. The contrast with Sarkis's semi-formal
seriousness is a great bit of mood-setting humor. But Halla goes much
deeper than that. Over the course of the book, Kingfisher makes clear
that Halla's leaps of logic and distracting questions are both
personality and a deliberate tactic, one carefully designed as
protective camouflage in more ways than one. It's beautifully done and,
alongside Halla's practical competence and willingness to grapple with
any idea, makes her just as capable as any other character in the
story, just along an entirely different axis than fighting or wielding
authority. It's also a bit like reading a fantasy novel with running
commentary from someone who is both mostly unflappable and intensely
curious about everything.

(And yes, it's hard not to read a lot of Halla's lines in the same
voice as Ursula Vernon's Twitter posts.)

This is a delightful sword and sorcery novel with some real depth of
characterization. It's also a bit lighter than The Wonder Engine, which
matches what I was in the mood for. I had some trouble with both the
romance and the melodrama of the last major plot challenge, but it kept
me happily turning the pages. Recommended.

Swordheart is complete on its own, although Kingfisher says in her
author's note that it's likely to be the first book of a trilogy.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2019-12-23

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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