Two books

The Dark Lord's Daughter by Patricia C. Wrede (2023): Kayla, a 14 year old girl living in St. Paul with her adopted mother and brother after her adopted dad died of cancer and left them all struggling under medical debt, discovers that her biodad was a Dark Lord in a different reality, and is forced to take on his role.
- This book is incredibly frustrating and honestly felt like such a waste. There were several moments where I looked at how many pages were left and were like "...how is it so far into this book and basically nothing has happened?" Page count is taken up by long meandering conversations filled with exposition that yet are somehow repetitive, everyone other than Kayla and her adopted family feel like they lack all agency because they're consumed by the Tropes (called "Traditions" but I refuse to get into how this book interacts with the idea of "tradition" -- what it means are "stale genre tropes" and I am not getting sidetracked too much by this except to note that it was infuriating), and the plot barely hangs together.
  
  Everyone in Kayla's biofamily is convinced she's going to murder them as soon as she comes into her power. Despite this, none of them try to do anything to stop this??? Her half-sister asks for clemency and says she realizes that there's a Get Out Of Murder Card by being arranged-married off to someone, and has picked that person out, but oh, you think, this is someone working with the tropes so she can marry her boyfriend who's on the wrong side? No. It is not that at all. She barely knows the guy, she just thinks he's unobjectionable; there is no indication he knows about this plan at all.
  
  Kayla's cousin who wants to be a bard and who also thinks it's inevitable that Kayla kills him? Etc etc etc. Kayla's uncle who thinks Kayla is going to kill them, etc etc etc.
- And also. Look. I do not need any book that has this kind of stuff to acknowledge the existence of the evil overlord list, or show any indication that the author has read it, but for a book published in 2023, come the fuck on, please acknowledge the subversion of these tropes. Maybe Kayla is too young for this, but her adopted mother is absolutely the right age to know them front and back.
  
  Everyone in this book is so passive!!!!!! No one in this book has read the evil overlord list!!!! The only one who shows any amount of genre-savviness is Del The Ten Year Old Brother who once notes that, if someone does X thing, it will not help because Y always happens after.
- I keep thinking, "I've read better versions on this published in the fucking 1980s, come on already."
- The only thing clever about this book are the excerpt bits at the beginning of each chapter from the instruction manual for being a dark lord, contrasted with Kayla's ongoing actions.
- I also really could have done without the umpteenth retort that Kayla's birth name is "dumb". We get it, you want to use the name Kayla. Can we not insult the name your parents gave you before you were kidnapped away from them?
- The worldbuilding on the magic types is also... very very confused? "If you are light magic, your hair turns white, if you are dark magic, you hair turns black, and the age this happens determines how powerful you are, with the later age the better" is set out as a rule. Kayla's hair has been black since she was a baby. This is questioned at one point but is ignored once it becomes clear that Kayla is very magically powerful. Del asks "what about redheads", is told that their hair also changes to the magical colors and that this is an odd question, and then of course he gains red hair magically, he has Old Magic that no one but two dead dragons remembers. So we don't know what's going on with Kayla's hair color nor, you might ask, what are the natural hair colors of this world, if both white hair and black hair are strange colors where your hair changes to that color to indicate magical talent. Does everyone here have brown hair and red hair naturally?
  
  Except, somehow, Kayla?????
- This book also has my complaints about lying marketing. The library blurb says "...As her family encounters fantastical creatures in place of their Earthly gadgets, Kayla must prepare for the unpreparable: meeting her father, the Dark Lord himself, for the very first time..." Her biodad is dead for ten years before the book begins. The back of the book talks about her having to make a choice between two worlds. She does not do that. She is kidnapped from Earth back into her birth world and does not have the power to leave it, and everyone else claims they don't have the power to send her back either. She does not meet her father and does not meaningfully choose anything! Her thinking "hey, maybe I can help out here" is meaningless since the other half of that sentence is "...since I can't get back anyway."
The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix (2023): I liked this more than The Left-handed Booksellers of London -- it's possible that Moffat's Doctor Who has soured me somewhat on "the main character is actually a ~~mystery to be solved~~" plot device. Now that Sharon is not a mystery and is just a character, I had a better time.

The plot's a fairly straight-forward mystery/caper/adventure thing. On the one hand, I liked that them having so much help and backup from the booksellers and the cops meant that there were whole aspects of the plot that did not require the central characters to actually do anything about to solve. On the other hand, there's this huge build-up in the book about Sharon having to go talk to Her Dad Who Is A Mountain on New Years/Actually The Winter Solstice about him giving her his power and that is entirely resolved off screen, and Sharon just does some exposition about the conversation that she had with him. Turns out all that power leakage and all that? Oh it's fine, just took a quick convo with Dad about waiting a century for Sharon to take over from him, no big deal.

But overall, I liked this book much better than the first, and if there is to be a third in this series, I'd probably put it on my library list.

It also amuses me that the narrative voice gives so much detail to what people are wearing as if I have any idea of what these iconic clothes or styles look like at all. At least all the name-dropping of books makes sense, considering this is, ostensibly, about people who sell books. (I do not recall a single book being sold in this book, unlike in the last one, where we at least entered a bookstore. They do, however, buy some books from an estate to kick off the action.)

And while I felt overall that The Dark Lord's Daughter needed a heavy hand of an editor, this one needed a very specific light touch; a key piece of information is supposed to be "she" in relationship to the wizard in the previous line of dialogue, or at least relatively recently above. I searched and searched and could not find it.

Overall, the whole wizard... daughter... granite piece of stone... relationship thing... look, maybe I skimmed too much, I don't know. But them deciding that the daughter was the one responsible for everything, and also that the wizard was, too... were we supposed to feel like the stone/fossil thing was a victim of Those Cruel Ruthless Women or the serial killer? Because it was not developed enough to be both.

And now to get too much into "I should sub-bulletpoint these as well" but your special people are only subject to "rare cancers". Are you sure? What's a rare cancer? Somehow those people never get common cancers but they get rare ones???? What is that piece of worldbuilding doing and why????

Damn, I have liked a lot of Wrede's work in the past so it's sad that The Dark Lord's Daughter is so terrible. If you can think of any of the versions from the 80s you liked, I'd love to get some recs!

Alas I can't recall specific titles or that, just an overwhelming feeling that I have read this done better when I was 10. The one thing that I did keep thinking of -- and not to the good -- was that bit in late Discworld where it's all "why don't the women in Jane Austen books just go get a fricking job". Especially the part in the Dark Lord's Daughter where Kayla's uncle by marriage is bemoaning all the Traditions that mean they're all doomed and he must take her to the castle and blah blah blah. I kept flashing back to Discworld. It shows this lack of respect for the genre you're making fun of; there are, in fact, legitimate reasons why the women in Jane Austen books don't just "get a job"! There may be legitimiate reasons in the kind of fantasy books Wrede is making fun of, that a guard captain might do the things he does. It was just so frustrating. If you're going to mock something, at least respect it for what it is while you do it!

I don't know if it will help with any of your complaints, but Pat Wrede is currently
working on the sequel to TDLD. I enjoyed it, in a middle-grade-fantasy-book sort of way. She's a friend, so that probably affects my opinion.

Two books

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