And you know who (partly) cheered me up? My girl (maybe?) K. J. Parker! If you do not know, K. J. Parker is an Enormous Mystery. It is widely believed that s?he is a lady, and s?he has said that K. J. Parker is a pseudonym for somebody you have never heard of. That’s fine by me. I say let the ?lady? have her privacy.

Although Blue and Gold is not the gold (ha ha ha) standard for K. J. Parker books I have ever read, it possesses the exact qualities I look for and cherish in a K. J. Parker book. I will enumerate those for you here.

1. Mindblowing attention to logistical detail. When you read a K. J. Parker book about alchemy, you get the feeling that K. J. Parker acquired all the materials used by medieval alchemists and spent three months in her lab trying to transmute base metals into gold. After reading The Belly of the Bow, I felt pretty confident that K. J. Parker can make a competent bow. After reading Devices and Desires, I felt a strong wish to have K. J. Parker on my side should I ever wish to lay siege to a city.
2. Utter lack of sentimentality. When you are feeling blue, it can be refreshing to read a book in which most of the characters are pretty frank about their intention to look out for number one. The protagonist of Blue and Gold, for instance, begins by admitting responsibility for the death of his wife. Over the course of the novella, he does quite a few things that might give you or me pause, because as he admits — he just wants to get out.
3. Relatedly: Characters who tell you exactly who they are, but you don’t totally believe them because you are used to that thing where protagonists are harder on themselves than they need to be? So when the time comes for the characters to display their absolute utter ruthlessness, even though they told you all along that’s what they were going to do, it still jolts the hell out of you. It is a trick I have seen very few authors even attempt, and K. J. Parker does it with apparent ease.

I’ve got one of Parker’s recent standalone novels out from the library now, and I’m very much looking forward to reading that too. K. J. Parker!

Here’s what some other folks had to say about Blue and Gold: Publishers Weekly mysterious refers to the protagonist as a “lovable rogue,” which is not exactly what I took away from the book, but never mind; Fantasy Book Critic highlights the fun of watching the story slowly unfurl its many layers; and Strange Horizons rightly calls Parker’s writing “intelligent, sardonic, and vivid.”

(Did you review this book? Drop a note in the comments, and I’ll add a link!)

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