The Palace Job – Review

The Palace Job by Patrick Weekes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! I think what I loved the most were the characters. At first, I didn’t really connect to any of them, but as the book progressed I started to really come to love each and everyone of them.

The leader of this ragtag crew is Loch, who is such a badass female character. She was a scouting captain in the war, and the whole heist mission is to get back a family heirloom that was stolen from her. Loch is so extremely smart and was always a step ahead of her enemies.

Her best friend and right hand man was Kail, whose fighting tactic was solely based on insulting his enemies mothers. It was so funny to see him use different insults to get them to mess up, and he even knows different languages to insult their mothers in!

Then we have Tern and Icy, who are partners in crime (literally). Tern is a master safecracker, and her demeanor and appearance made her enemies underestimate her, which was a mistake. Tern’s fighting style is basically what my own would be if I were in a fantasy novel: kick them in the shins. Icy, whose name stands for Indomitable Courteous Fist, is a master thief who has as much morals as a thief could have. He is able to contort his body and was always very calm in the horrible situations they would get into.

The groups wizard, Hessler, was kind of like the moral compass of the group, which was pretty ironic considering that he joined the group after being thrown out of his wizard university for illegal activities. He ends up meeting a boy named Dairy, who immediately attaches himself to Hessler and basically has no skills that he can bring to the table as far as the heist goes, but Loch sees something in him and brings him along.

Then we have Ululenia, who is a shapeshifting unicorn. Yeah, you heard that right! She brought a lot of beautiful prose to the book and a break from all the ass-kicking and witty one liners.

And then we have my two favorite characters, Desidora who is a death priestess and Ghylspwr, who is a talking warhammer. Every time Desidora would use her death priestess powers, she would become extremely pale, her dress and hair would become black, and things around her would suddenly start growing skulls. Ghylspwr only said like, three things and they were all in a different language, but he still had a personality and all the other characters were able to understand what it was he was trying to say.

So now that I’ve talked about my favorite part of the book, I want to mention what I think could’ve used some work. The world building for me left a little to be desired. I’m really big on world building, and with this book, I wish that we would’ve gotten more information about the history of the world, because they mention a war and a Republic and an Empire, but its never really fully explained. I also think that there were some plot holes that could’ve been fixed. The one example that comes to mind for me is towards the end of the book, where one of our characters die and we know that he is dead. Everyone mourns him, but then in almost the very next scene, he is alive and no one mentions that he was presumed dead. There is really no explanation as to how he is not dead, and that was something that really threw me out of the book. There were other moments as well where I would have to go back and reread a page or two because I thought that I missed something.

All of that aside, this book was really funny and made me laugh out loud multiple times. If you love fantasy, and especially funny and witty fantasy, I would recommend that you check this book out!