Swordheart by T. Kingfisher is a delightful fantasy romance with a heaping helping of adventure (5/5 stars)

Swordheart by T. Kingfisher is a delightful fantasy romance with a heaping helping of adventure.

I’ve been meaning to read this book for a long time, and once Tor announced they were going to publish a beautiful hardcover edition with an amazing cover, I knew I needed to buy it. So I ordered it from bookshop.org to help support my local Friends of the Library! I’m glad I did; it ended up becoming a new favorite for me.

I listened to the audiobook which I borrowed from my library. I really enjoyed listening to the narrator, Jesse Vilinsky! They did a great job really making Kingfisher’s prose and sense of humor really shine.

T. Kingfisher always does a fabulous job with world-building, and this book is no different. I truly want to see this adapted for television or film; it would be SO FUN.

Hella a housekeeper to her great-uncle (by marriage), and after his death she inherits his entire estate… and the rest of his horrible family. When said horrible family intends to imprison her in the home and force her to marry the son of the matriarch, she decides to un-alive herself. Luckily for her, she sword she pulls off the wall to do the deed is actually Sarkis, an immortal swordsman trapped in a prison of his own made of enchanted steel.

They have a great slow-burn romance set against the backdrop of a road trip to help Hela take back her inheritance. Both main characters are older (Hella is middle-aged and Sarkis is several hundreds of years old) and they have phenomenal banter. Hella is absolutely written to be neurodivergent, though it’s never spelled out as such. She really made me feel seen; I have ADHD and saw a lot of my habits in her characterization, especially when she said she does well with routines.

Sarkis is very dark and brooding, and I love that in a MMC. I really appreciated that Sarkis didn’t actually try to change his relationship with Hella until they were on more equal footing. What could have been an issue of power dynamics between them was easily sorted out that way. Various characters say it throughout the book and I wholeheartedly agree: he is such a good pairing for Hella.

There’s some great non-binary representation in the lawyer-priest Zale. It was lovely to see in the author’s note that Kingfisher had sensitivity readers double-check the representation, too. You love to see it!

The whole concept of the Temple of the White Rat is so interesting to me. It houses an order of god-touched social workers, healers, and public defenders. I can’t wait to read more in this world!

Tropes in this book include: older protagonists, neurodivergent representation, nonbinary representation, road trip, slow burn

CW: violence, death, confinement

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