psocoptera

Paladin's Faith, T. Kingfisher, 2023 novel. Book four of a planned seven (previously here). I have some thoughts. Very spoilers.

I loved the first three and was so excited to read this one but it didn't work for me. Don't get me wrong, there's some really interesting theology-worldbuilding stuff going on here regarding demons, gods, and paladins, and I'm still eager to read the rest of the series. (This one was our last "unattached" dude paladin, Shane; we now have the two women and the guy who's been letting his wife think he was dead left. One of the women is being played up as young and naive, one is somehow mysteriously Weird and now voluntarily possessed by a demon trying to become a god.) But the structure of the book didn't quite hang together (the first part was court intrigue with an unexpected lack of severed heads, and then suddenly the last chunk has to do with this demon/god situation, which felt like it had nothing to do with anything set up in the first part) and the romance felt... really underdeveloped. Like, ok, the characters are attracted to each other, and then suddenly they're in love, but I felt like we sort of skipped the part where they got to know each other and *fell* in love? Like, they do spend all this time on the road together, but, I don't know, it felt like Vernon was just like "ok they need to be in love now" but we didn't really see it happen. And then the whole end, with the paladin being taken up by another god, felt really weird to me, like, here's this whole story about how he's been having to live with this experienced rejection that makes his loss of the god who died more complicated, which is powerful, right? Like, that's another angle on the whole grief and loss thing. And then it's just like, nope, nevermind, second chance, but this didn't feel like it was being a book about second chances, like, that could have been the whole thread through it, but wasn't. I don't know. I think at the very least we needed to see what Wren thought about the whole thing, as this book's representative of The Other Paladins, but she's weirdly absent from the denouement. I feel like a giant asshole speculating that Vernon may have been working on this book while dealing with cancer and chemo and thus maybe wasn't writing with her normal full attention and power, but, like, there are some very good *pieces* here (there's this whole thread about boots and mud and then ground-wights which are as demented as anything else she's ever come up with) but the whole big picture of it isn't quite there.