25th August 2026 | Fantasy Romance | USA | 448 pages
Four hundred years ago, three warriors were trapped inside enchanted swords, cursed to be immortal servants of whoever wielded the blade. One of them is the Dervish, a restless, fiery soul who hates his captivity and hates his wielders even more, but has never found a way to escape the sword’s magic.
Then one day, a disillusioned scholar named Learned Edmund is tasked with delivering the sword to a distant city, and, in the greatest of peril, draws the blade.
The Dervish finds himself bound to a sweet, brilliant, and above all kind young man. And while he may be able to protect Edmund from bandits, cultists, dragons, and strange inhuman diplomats, he may find it much harder to protect his own heart.
Note: This is a companion sequel to Swordheart. This review is spoiler-free for both Swordheart and Daggerbound, however I highly recommend reading Swordheart first as some of the characters show up and the emotional impact will be higher and your understanding of the back story will be more complete. You can find my review of Swordheart here.
I received an advanced copy of this book courtesy of Netgalley and the publisher, Orbit (Little, Brown Book Group UK). All opinions are my own.
This book was fun and addictive – like all of T. Kingfisher’s fantasy romances. I read it in two days despite being especially busy and was hooked from the very beginning. That being said, I didn’t enjoy this book as much as book 1. By all measures, I should have enjoyed this book *more* (it had a big focus on language and interspecies interactions etc which I found fascinating – definitely my favourite part of the book). However, the chemistry just wasn’t there for me and that’s a big issue for a book that is mostly romance set in a fantasy world, rather than the other way around.
I like both our main characters independently, but their romance just felt… underdeveloped. It wasn’t quite instalove (although definitely some instalove), but I just didn’t feel the kind of fluttering, giddy feeling I want to feel at the love interests getting together. I didn’t think they were bad for each other – it just felt like they liked each other because the author said they did rather than because they themselves did. And then we skipped very quickly from “not my type” to “okay maybe he’s actually hot” to “I would lay down my life for you”.
The final remark I want to make has to do with the accessibility of the book. One of the non-human characters uses effectively a music box-like contraption to speak and in order to demonstrate how the words flow together, the words are writtenallnextoeachotherlikethiswithnospaces. Although this didn’t impede my personal enjoyment (at most I had to slow down a bit and read things twice where they weren’t immediately obvious), but it made me concerned about how easy it would be for dyslexics to read.
My little sister (who is dyslexic) says she’s not sure how much of a difference it really makes, but if she saw it in a book she wouldn’t read the book because she would be worried it would. My sister is obviously a sample of (1), and maybe a survey of more dyslexics would reveal that this is completely fine, but I do think at least some consideration needs to be made as to the accessibility of the text (for example, maybe including the regular text somewhere in the book or experimenting with bolding the beginning of a word or using other methods and seeing which one is the most accessible). If the current method *is* the most accessible after going through this process, then I will retract this statement. It *is* very effective at communicating the speaking style of the character.
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Are you looking forward to reading Daggerbound when it comes out? If you were also lucky enough to read it early, I’m interested to hear what you thought!
Keira x
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