Swordheart

"I really love Kingfisher’s work, and she writes very widely – whatever the heck she wants to write, which I admire a lot. But Swordheart is the story of a woman who is being pushed into a marriage with her clammy-handed cousin in order for her extended family to steal her inheritance. And she, in an effort to kill herself, makes the acquaintance of a warrior trapped inside a sword, named Starkis. It’s really a fantasy romance , and also a little bit of a road movie. They work toward reclaiming her inheritance, and meet lots of adorable characters along the way, like Brindle the Gnole, and Zale – he’s sort of a lawyer-warrior for the Church of the White Rat. But it’s also just very, very funny. T. Kingfisher writes in a modern voice, which I really appreciate in fantasy. I love being able to immediately relate to the characters; I find with a lot of epic fantasy, there’s all this added distance in language and in culture that makes it harder for me to connect immediately. Definitely. There’s this continuum of humour, right? You’ve got your dark, dark humour; you’ve got your Pratchett-level humour, which is a little bit sharp sometimes; then you’ve got the gentler humour; and then you’ve got your laugh-out-loud stuff, more the Douglas Adams end of things. And I think all of them work. I think that being comfortable, being safe, often involves gentle humour, because that gentler humour is how we cope with the difficult things in life. That’s what we use to paper over some of the cracks."