Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
Swordheart by T. Kingfisher is a cosy fantasy adventure with some funny moments and good banter. It’s an easy, breezy read, but failed to evoke any deeper emotion in me than that.
Halla is an unusual heroine. When we meet her she’s a 36-year-old widow, who starts off this journey by trying to kill herself.
Despite being a mature woman, she’s inexperienced and the explanation of why this is so felt very credible. Certainly, her journey through life as a woman with few means rings very true, and her coping mechanisms also sounded very familiar.
She had to be practical. Other women got to be impractical – young ones, beautiful ones, ones with well-off families to catch them when they did something foolish. Halla was no longer young and had never been beautiful. So, she had to be one of the practical ones.
— “Swordheart”, T. Kingfisher
Sarkis is the grumpy to Halla’s sunshine. He’s also a mature character, over 500 years old to be precise, and sporting what I can only call a warrior dad-bod. What sets him apart from more typical romance love interests is that he’s trapped in a sword.
The first half of the book breezes by.
We get to know Halla and her dire circumstances, and get the Call to Adventure and some Fun and Games. But then it starts to get really disjointed.
We take a trip into the fairy realm of the roaming hills, but it has no bearing on the plot. It didn’t even give them a shortcut to their destination. It feels like a horror chapter, and very out of place in a cosy romance fantasy — the stakes are literally already life and death (which at times seem to defy an otherwise cosy story), so in that regard it doesn’t add anything to the rest of the story.
It felt more like an Easter Egg for those who’ve read the previous books set in the same world (I have not), but that whole sojourn adds nothing to the story — even though they float the option of freeing Sarkis from the sword.
Were things cut from this book that were originally in the story that tied this all together better?
The world-building in general feels like it takes a backseat to the meandering story, as it seems like we’re supposed to be familiar with the world already.
The way the different temples coexist (or don’t coexist in the case of the Motherhood) is interesting and this aspect plays deeply into events, though not plot-related. Obviously, any reader’s favourite is the Temple of The Rat (as it’s designed to be).
As a romance, this story works, but don’t expect much in the way of fantasy or plot arc. The whole book is essentially the characters travelling back and forth on the same road.
I’m not entirely sure why it needed to have so much travelling. Mainly to facilitate interactions with the Motherhood, and eventually the paladins, though both of these really only impact the sub-plot, and have a detrimental effect on the pacing.
Close to the end is where things really fall apart.
First of all, the third act break-up is super, super clunky.
Up to that point, the book has established Halla as an almost stupidly empathetic person, who has already forgiven Sarkis for killing people right in front of her.
A mercenary captain switching sides in a war that was fought 500 years ago, and has more meaning to Sarkis than Halla, being the straw that breaks the camels back of their relationship feels like stupid and lazy writing.
If Sarkis had been sworn to serve, rather than a hired sword, this would have made so much more sense, because it would have given Halla reason to see he betrayed someone who trusted him, which would have extended to her, making her question her own choice to trust him (which is what her character arc is largely about anyway).
The story recovers fairly well after this poorly employed plot device, but just as my support for Sarkis and Halla got back to full strength, we end up in the marriage negotiations which infuriated me, because they shone a light on how politically correct this book is trying to be.
While there were some good ideas, such as this being a mature couple, having a major character be non-binary, as well as some good conversations about power imbalances in the relationships and explicit, enthusiastic consent on the page (even if the explaining sex to Halla felt infantilising at times), the marriage negotiations just undid a lot of that.
It’s like this one little novel is trying to right all the PC wrongs in one fell swoop. It’s too much, and adds little to nothing to the narrative itself (other than contrived complexity). Less would have been more in this case. Especially, since this seems to be just the start of a longer story, meaning that there’s time to explore all those themes.
I also don’t appreciate how Halla’s husband was portrayed. He isn’t a major character in any way, but the author unnecessarily goes out of their way to equate his value as a person to his sexual virility. Which in this case was none, meaning we should view him as a trash person.
It was fine when it was more vague mentions of him just being kind of boring and uninterested in having a wife (getting married more to please his mother than anything else) or relations with her, but then when Halla gets into her past relationship more, it turns kind of repulsive.
There was no need for Halla to dump on her ex-husband’s lack of interest in sex, and insinuate that because he totally lacked a sexual drive, he was not a good person. Contrast this with Halla, who had a sex drive, but was unable or prevented from expressing it (aka her goodness as a person) by him, deeming the only character that seems to be aro/ace a villain merely for being who he was.
TMI, Halla. TMI.
That and Sarkis’ obsession with the marriage negotiations really left a sour note. Halla even offered at one point for him to simply steal her away, but this was that one instance where toxic masculinity was allowed to come to the fore, whereas the book in general was going for a non-toxic masculine, feminist approach to gender power dynamics.
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