Reading order: Sword-Dancer, Sword-Singer, Sword-Maker, Sword-Breaker, Sword-Born, and Sword-Sworn. Another wonderful example of a series staying true to itself. I hope you'll want to continue on as each book gets better and better. The fighting is awesome, the stakes emotional and high, the magic complex and everchanging, and the romance subtle and stretching out over the whole series. But rest assured, by the time the end of the first book rolls around your hearts will be won over. It takes guts to start a series off with two such difficult, problematic characters. On paper they are the definition of heroes, but as you get to know them you realize how very far they really are from their outer personas.

And so it's not a case of her getting him to come around or him breaking through her icy exterior and either of them 'fixing' the other. Having sacrificed everything to exact revenge for her brother, she has given up most of her humanity along with it. And the wonderful thing, the thing that had me jumping up and down inside as I read this book for the first time, is the fact that Del is just as remote and prickly and hard as Tiger is annoying. Tiger was the most powerful acolyte from a Sword Dancer order in the south. Because it’s so late in the series, the premise is pretty complex. After reading it, I feel compelled to pick up the first Sword Dancer novel and get reading. Tiger has a long way to go and plenty of pages in which to make a transformation of sorts. Sword-Bearer is the eighth novel in the Sword Dancer series by Jennifer Roberson. But you must remember this is how it begins. To a certain degree, his attitude is to be expected. He completed his master-level training at an unprecedented speed. He slew the sandtiger that was systematically decimating his village and has the claw-shaped scar on his cheek to prove it. And he narrates the story! But then he is a living legend, after all. He is a womanizer and lazy to go with it.

He is irascible and monumentally arrogant. I will just go ahead and start by saying you will not like Tiger at first.

Sword-Dancer by Jennifer Roberson