Coming of age books are (to quote the endlessly quotable Mugatu) so HOTT right now. A lot of fantastical fiction -- Harry Potter, Bartimaeus, The Dark is Rising, hell, Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- traces the journey of a young (often teenage) hero or heroine as s/he discovers, accepts, and fully expresses his or her own personal power. It’s not so often, though, that we see the same sort of narrative applied to a woman at midlife. With Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold steps up and admirably fills this gap.

Paladin of Souls is a sequel to The Curse of Chalion, which was itself, as a romantic fantasy novel, something of a departure from the space operas with which Bujold made her name. As Paladin begins, Iselle and Bergon rule in Chalion and Ibra, with loyal Cazaril serving as Chancellor. Thanks to Cazaril’s courageous actions in the previous book, the curse that bedeviled Chalion for so long has been lifted, and the realm is thriving; the joint kingdoms are largely at peace, although they deal with the occasional border incursion and suchlike. Iselle’s mother, Ista, who lost her husband, her son, and very nearly her sanity to the Curse, has been quietly healing these past two years, and as the story opens, she’s growing restless. Smothered by the attentions of her well-meaning but overzealous family and courtiers, she longs for the open road… so she throws together a retinue and embarks upon a journey -- officially a pilgrimage to pray for a grandson, but really an excuse to get out of the house. When her party is attacked on the road, she is rescued by the charming and magnetic Lord Arhys, who sweeps her away to his castle… where she meets Arhys’s young, beautiful, and jealous wife, learns that Arhys himself has one doozy of a secret, discovers the castle’s resident Sleeping Beauty (who happens to be a dude… a handsome, intelligent, drily witty dude, as it turns out), and comes to terms with her own unique and notable gifts.

You see, Ista is a “saint” through whom one of Chalion’s five deities -- the Father, the Mother, the Daughter, the Son, and the Bastard (god of randomness and chaos) -- can speak and/or act. It’s Ista’s, um, good fortune that the Bastard has chosen her as his representative in the world of matter. Unfortunately, Ista has dealt with the Five before and it didn’t go so well, so her reaction upon realizing that the Bastard hasn’t quite abandoned her is along the lines of “Oh, you’re still here. Great?” But her personal relationship with the Bastard deepens (they have several very amusing exchanges) as her understanding of her place in the world grows.

If I’m making it sound like a dullsville travelogue describing some boring old chick’s navel-gazing spiritual journey… it’s really not like that at all. Ista has every reason to mistrust the Bastard and his most holy family (The Curse of Chalion contains the full, sad backstory), and her eventual acceptance of her destiny is gripping and compelling. Also… it’s Bujold, so you’d expect the story to be absorbing, and it is; you’d expect the characters to be funny, articulate, and interesting, and they are; and you’d expect the world of Chalion to come alive for you page by page, and it does. All of that almost goes without saying.

What’s really interesting to me, though, is Bujold’s optimistic approach to middle age. It’s probably not unheard of but it’s certainly rare for the theme of midlife renewal to be as prominent as it is here. Genre heroines as a group tend to skew young; in our recent rundown of ass-kicking literary heroines, only one -- interestingly, another Bujold creation, Cordelia Vorkosigan -- is over thirty when we first encounter her. (Unless you count the Weird Sisters, and they’re kind of in a class by themselves, wouldn’t you say?) But with Ista, who is flat-out forty, Bujold has tapped into the -- gah, I hate the word zeitgeist, but that’s what Bujold has tapped into. We’re all getting older -- in the United States, the enormous generation of Baby Boomers has just hit retirement age -- and all of a sudden middle age and beyond are states to be anticipated with a light heart and embraced as “the wisdom years,” in which all the efforts of our younger years pay off and we can travel and go dancing and have plenty of highly satisfactory sex and buy an expensive car. In this context, Ista is very much a heroine for our time. By the end of the book, her old-guard courtiers want her to go home and sit in the window and do needlepoint, but brave Ista has a new outlook, a new purpose, and a new man. She’s a role model for anyone who’s feeling a bit nervous about life’s second act, and her story will make you smile. As a woman of… um, Ista’s general age range, I can’t recommend Paladin of Souls highly enough.

  -- Kate Nagy