Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher

[lightreads]

Hemlock & Silver

4/5. One of her standalone twisted fairy tales, this one about the poisoning expert called in to figure out if the king’s daughter is being poisoned, and the strange and horrifying magical discoveries she makes.

This is good, but it finally clarified for me what is wrong with her romances. The good stuff first: a wonderfully practical, weird, obsessive, traditionally unbeautiful heroine. A series of animal companions, talking and otherwise. A genuinely creepy place to explore. A sad fairy tale under it all.

The romance: This one is not as bad as many of her others, I will say. But I finally put my finger on what’s wrong with them. It’s that she spent the first half of this book developing this woman into a vivid, quirky, peculiar, wonderful character. And the second the romance is on page, every jot of that character work vanishes and she reverts to boring and clumsy romance beats. Like the heroine coming to the conclusion, despite vast mountains of evidence, that the guy is repulsed by her. A thing that could happen? Sure. A thing that could happen with this character? I suppose, but you’d have to lay a lot of groundwork. Fundamentally, I think her heroines, which are the best part of these books, stop being themselves when it comes to romance, and I hate that.

Content notes: Past child death, past murder of spouse, creepiness with mirrors, body horror.

Comments

[dismallyoriented]

Hough. I like T Kingfisher for the whimsical-but-lived-in fantasy that she writes, but I think you've hit the nail on the head here that she's writing really formulaically around the romances. I've read plenty of fic authors for the way they fixate and iterate upon a particular ship and pairing dynamic (or character arc), but I got tired of this script after the last fantasy novella I read from her. I don't know if it's because it's not to my taste (there are parts of the script that are Painfully heterosexual, which stand out more the more it's repeated), or if it's the dissonance between theoretically independent/unrelated characters slotting into the exact same arc over and over that's putting me off.

[lightreads]

Yes, it really is the same romance story repeated over and over. You're right it feels very het, though I will say that the one queer romance of hers I read also bored/irritated me in the exact same way, so.