It also gets her into an equal amount of problems that mostly get solved with stabbing by her magic sword man, who comes from the same family of characters as Sam Vimes and Geralt of Rivia. This works on guards, bandits, murderers, enchanted swords, priests, and lawyers. Our penniless bimbo, who comes from the same family of characters as Arthur Dent and George of the Jungle, has learned to survive mostly by acting dumb and talking at her problems till they go away. In trying to kill herself with the only thing available – a rusty old sword that had been hanging over the fireplace in her tiny bedroom for decades, she accidentally releases a man who is either is a sword or lives in the sword (this is a semantic distinction no real answer is given to but much time is spent contemplating) and is sworn to protect the wielder. The scheme is mostly comprised of (1) lock her in a room, (2) marry her to her late husband’s clammy handed brother, (3) profit. The family naturally descends on her and immediately begins scheming how to get it back.

Plot: A penniless widow has inherited all the money and assets of her late husband’s great-uncle, who she’d been caring for since her husband died. I think most of you have already left to go order this book, but I guess I’ll still go through the motions. But romance it is, and relatable romance so much as it can be without traitorous relatives and a ensorcelled sword.Imagine if Terry Pratchett’s writing and Douglas Adams’ writing had a baby and you basically have T.

I’m pretty sure that although Ursula Vernon insists she writes “fluffy romance” on Twitter that this doesn’t qualify as “fluffy” unless you ask Halla what she thinks of her own weight. It gets weird in the ways of the Clockwork Boys stories, with strange creatures on a road that disappears and reappears, bandits, murderers, ruthless priests, not-ruthless lawyer priests, a gnoll that drives the ox, an ox named Prettyfoot, hands-down the nastiest aunt I’ve found in a book in quite some time, and a clammy-handed man who nobody should marry.Īnd then somehow everything works out and the people who need to be dead are dead and the people who you were kind of hoping would be dead are banged up at least, and the people who should be in love are in love. This book is the story of Sarkis, a man whose spirit has been placed in a sword, and Halla, a 36 year old widow who was planning to kill herself with the sword until a warrior appareted into her bedroom when she tried to do the deed.

Screaming birds generally aren’t put in the plot for no reason and this bird is way too much a Chekhov’s Bird to just be sitting there.Īnyway, this book is fantastic, and I’m now hungry for the next two.

Kingfisher was the beginning of a trilogy when the bird slipped through a plot hole there at the end and didn’t amount to anything. I probably should have known Swordheart by T.

Swordheart by t kingfisher