The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig Book Review

 The Knight and the Moth

(The Stonewater Kingdom #1)

By Rachel Gillig 

Published Year: 2025

Page Count: 385 pages 

Medium Used: Paperback 

Genre: Romance, Romantasy, High Fantasy, Gods and Magic Objects, Young Adult, 2026-read. 

Rating: 4.5/5 😎 😄😀😏 

The writing is compelling. The story has traction and reads solid. One corrupt human turned God. She is not benevolent. She makes five fake gods called Omens and keeps them chained to her gifts of gold and divine offerings for centuries. They have got used to having power that they don't want to relinquish. She takes on young orphan girls and trains them at the arts of divination. They can get signs and portents from these omens and use them to guide/control people and kingdoms. One such diviner is Sybil Delling, also called 'six' because she is the sixth and most noted diviner in her batch. These diviners are on a rotation cycle of ten years - every ten years new ones take the roles of diviners. There are five hamlets in the kingdom and they each hold the housing place to one omen. 

One day, the new king Castor Benedict comes with his army for a divination. Sybil is chosen as the diviner and she predicts unfavorable signs from all five omens. After that she notices that one by one, her fellow diviners are vanishing. She sets out with Rory Myndacious and the king's army to search for them. She also wants to get away from the cathedral where her time is drawing to an end. 

So the rest of the story is how, convinced that the omens are not true gods but humans who are granted immortality, she defeats them one after the other with her hammer and chisel. It was entertaining to read a different method employed with each of the five omens and finally the Moth, the kingpin omen. She is teemed with Rory, King Benji, Maude the knight, Barthelomew the Gargoyle from the cathedral. The objects these Omens possess are stone coin, inkwell, an oar, a chime and a loom stone. She collects these  artefacts from them after killing them and bestows them onto the new King who wants to take the mantel and become the new resource of power. Lol. How could they have not seen through his cunning heart? 

I felt the romance is not overwhelming or taking center stage here. There are just two episodes where Rory and Six get intimate but that only adds to their suffering from seperation later. The world development is good. The names of places and omens are difficult to remember so I didn't bother to. They are hard to roll off the tongue. At times, I felt the author is making the scenes more dramatic than needed. And after all the pieces of the puzzle shift and make sense, it is one big 'aha' moment.  The cliffhanger at the end is something I didn't see coming. It is tough to believe and trust in a world made up of corrupt and self serving people. And one of them should be the king himself.. well. That's the story!