T. Kingfisher’s books have been floating in and out of my TBR list for ages now. I have had a copy of Swordheart on my Kindle for ages now, but for some reason I never felt the urge to actually pick it up (virtually speaking, that is) and start reading it, even though it appears to be that rare unicorn–a standalone fantasy book.
As it were, Swordheart isn’t really a standalone book, in so much as it takes place in the same universe as a number of her other books. In this book, we are introduced to this world, one which immediately captivated me.
A religious pantheon of temples, gods, and their servants underpin a lot of what happens in this Kingfisherverse. There are a number of gods, all of which are ‘real’ in the sense that they do things and are known. There isn’t one true god or anything, and each one has a type of adherent that they call to. The Dreaming God, for example, is served by an army of painfully good looking, earnest paladins (knights), who basically live to kill demons who have possessed living creatures. Mostly farm animals, it must be said. The paladin in our tale unfortunately went on a rampage and murdered a few nuns when a demon possessed him, so he’s stuck in a weird limbo where he’s not responsible but also he murdered a bunch of people.
I’m forgetting where we learn about which religion, but I will spend time also talking about my favorite one–the Rat, which is a literal rat (i.e., not a magical/mythical rat) whose adherents are priests of various stripes and whose calling in life is solving problems. That’s it. Rats are industrious, and so is the Temple of the Rat, who will help anyone with anything legal, even if the person coming for help themselves isn’t legal per se. Isn’t that excellent?
So really, this is just a book about personalities crashing and doing the bouncing off of one another thing that works well when its done well. The only downside is that it’s clear this is a very short book that forms one half of a whole (the sequel), and that every so often in service of showing not telling we’re dropped into a situation that comes out of nowhere. As a very irate reviewer of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell once noted, people who know things don’t sit around expositioning them to one another. But in this case, it would be nice to know what a wonder engine actually is (or isn’t) even if it is unrealistic that Learned Edmund would explain something so basic to people who would know what it is.