Honor’s Knight
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ☆
Honor’s Knight (Paradox, Book 2) by Rachel Bach
This series is OUT THERE!
It’s fast-paced, wild, and bursting with insane ideas. The story is bonkers, the universe is chaotic, and the characters are unlike anything else in sci-fi. It’s perfect.
Just look at this lineup:
A pilot who’s literally a giant bird with an attitude problem. 🦅
A doctor who’s an eight-foot-tall, gender-swapping lizard covered in razor-sharp scales… and known for eating humans. (Sure, you could argue that gives them great medical knowledge, but still, WTF?!) 🦎🧟♂️
A cook who can morph into a superhero with dragon scales. 🦸♂️🐉
Planet-sized space squids. 🦑
A character named Novascape Starchild (yes, that’s real) who can see people’s auras.
Plasmex (the series’ version of “the Force.”)
Memory wiping.
Space knights. ⚔️
Children sacrificed into mind-controlled slavery, then executed before they go insane.
Oh, and those same children are the only ones who can see and kill the mysterious phantoms: creatures capable of wiping out entire planets.
And our main character? She’s infected with a virus that can destroy all the phantoms… but might also destroy everything. 🦠
And somehow, SOMEHOW… it all works. 🙌
Plenty of trilogies hit that dreaded “second book slump,” but Honor’s Knight doesn’t. It answers major questions from book one, expands on the mysteries, and delivers constant revelations and plot twists. Instead of feeling like filler before the finale, it’s arguably the most vital entry in the series. By the end, the only question left is: how the hell is this all going to end?
What makes the series even more compelling is its moral ambiguity. There’s no clear-cut hero or villain. The closest thing to antagonists would be either the Xith’cal or the phantoms. Even then, the Xith’cal are more just a hazard to be avoided, and the phantoms may not even be aware of the destruction they're causing.
Even the “good guys” make ruthless choices. Many of them fully embrace the idea that “the end justifies the means,” doing what they believe is necessary for the greater good:
“But how could you do that to those poor girls? How could you use and kill the daughters?”
“Because it was worth it,” he said. “Maat and her daughters are the only weapons we have against the phantoms, and phantoms destroy worlds. When you look at it that way, what is one girl’s life? What is one family’s pain weighed against the potential loss of billions?”
That’s the kind of brutal, thought-provoking logic this series thrives on.
Outlandish, imaginative, action-packed, and gleefully unconcerned with grounded science, Honor’s Knight proves just how much fun space opera can be when it embraces its weirdest, wildest ideas.
It’s AWESOME. 👍
