Honor’s Knight

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Honor’s Knight (Paradox, Book 2) by Rachel Bach

This series is OUT THERE!!

Very fast paced. The story is insane, the universe is crazy, and the characters are one-of-a-kind.
🥺 It’s perfect 🥺

Let’s see:
- The pilot is a giant bird with an attitude problem. (Yes, you read that correctly. A giant bird. 🦅)
- The doctor is a gender swapping 8 foot lizard species with razor sharp scales known for eating humans. 🦎🧟‍♂️ (Now, one could argue that because it eats humans, it's intimately familiar with the human body, which makes them a great doctor. But still, WTF!)
- A cook that can morph into what’s basically a superhero with dragon scales. 🦸‍♂️🐉
- Planet-size space squids. 🦑
- A character named Novascape Starchild who can see peoples auras. (Because that's just an awesome name.)
- Plasmex. (Which is basically this series' version of the force.)
- Memory wiping.
- Space knights. ⚔️
- Children sacrificed into mind controlled slavery. Then executed before they themselves go insane.
- Said children are also the only ones who can see and kill the phantoms. What are the phantoms? No one knows. But they can destroy entire planets, so they need to be dealt with.
- BUT, our main character has been infected with a virus that can kill all the phantoms. However, it can also kill... EVERYTHING. 🦠 So she needs to get that under control.

And yet somehow, SOMEHOW... it all works. 🙌

There are a lot of questions left over from the first book, but thankfully there's no second book lull, many of those questions are not only answered, but expanded upon. Instead of the second book just being giant tease for the third, it becomes a vital must-read entry with revelations and plot twist galore.

Many series will string you along to the very end, where they deliver a barrage of action and revelations in a densely pact climax, making you think that it was all worth it (maybe not on purpose). But the fact is that you can often skip large sections (sometimes entire books) and still have the same experience.

With Paradox, you can't do that. Every entry is vital. In fact, in terms of information, Honor's Knight is easily the most important book in the series. By the end of it, your only real question is, how's it all going to end? Which, trust me, is motivation enough.

One of the more compelling things about this story is that there is no definitive Hero or Villain. The closest things to villains would either be the Xith'cal or the phantoms. The Xith'cal are the same alien race as the previously mentioned doctor, but I would consider them more of a hazard that our main characters just need to try and stay away from. The phantoms would be the more obvious villain, but there's the lingering question of whether or not the phantoms are even aware of the damage they're causing.

Even our heroes are not all good. There is a clear mentality of "the end justifies the means" amoung many of the characters, and they are simply doing what they believe is best 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?”

This series is outlandish, wildly imaginative, action packed, and throws grounded science out the airlock to provide utterly unique space opera escape. It's AWESOME! 👍