2019 fantasy. The Quest is over; the magic gem destroyed the Old God,
cured the king, and ushered in peace and happiness for everyone. But
Apprentice Knight Kalanthe still needs to find a rich husband to pay
back the cost of her training, and Olsa still needs to steal for a
living even though she's bought herself free of her obligation to the
Thief Bosses.
They also fell in love with each other on the quest, but really,
that's the least of their problems. (Flashbacks to "Before" show how
the situation ended up as it does in "After", though there aren't many
surprises.)
One's own background knowledge has to do a lot of heavy lifting,
though. What does the city look like? Why is there a formal
organisation of thieves that everyone knows about and the knights
fighting for justice never seem to consider taking on? You've read
other fantasy, fill it in for yourself. And then I find myself
disorientated as the narration flips to oddly specific: Olsa is black,
and an orphan who's largely raised herself, so she needs to be told
how to braid her hair. There's a long clumsy diversion into the use of
the word "bisexual". I'm all for representation, but this is a society
in which nobody cares that all the knights on the Quest were women
(apparently by coincidence, though most of the people we see in charge
of things are men) or that some of them weren't born that way, so the
real-world message of "and that's Just Fine", which is clearly part of
the author's remit, fells rather flat in that there's nobody in the
world who needs to hear it. I suppose there's a certain implicit
suggestion of "so why can't we do that out here in the real world
too", but that's barely present in the writing compared with some of
what felt to me like the heavy-handedness of getting the
representation into this fantasy world in the first place
Combine that with the principals being separated for most of "After",
so that we see their relationship mostly in flashback, and this isn't
much of a romance. Rather, it's separate challenges: Kalanthe gets an
offer of marriage which is clearly the best she'll receive, and
she'd clearly be a fool not to accept it, but she still needs to nerve
herself up to do so. The Thief Lords have evidently set up Olsa to
fail repeatedly until she runs out of influential friends to have her
pardoned, but she hasn't worked this out, and although she's
determinedly independent she needs to learn to accept the help of
those friends for more than just a get out of jail free card.
There are bits of this book that I love, mostly in the personalities
of the leads, but I kept expecting it to go somewhere more challenging
than it did. Things quickly come to a climax and then everything is
resolved, at least for the principals, with little time even to dwell
on their potential happiness together.
Johnston dedicates this book to David and Leigh Eddings, so I'm
guessing she doesn't know about their child abuse conviction. But also
she manages to avoid the Eddings' gender essentialism, so maybe she
just read their books as an uncritical child and hasn't gone back.
Very wise.