Shadow's Daughter
I experienced a lot of flux in my enthusiasm level for this book. It starts out hitting hard on one of my pet peeves: made-up words. So many made-up words that the glossary at the end of the book is 8 pages long. So at first I hated it. Then I kinda started to dig the book when the parents of the protagonist didn’t immediately die and I made it past the halfway mark without her ever being sexually assaulted. By the end, I was back to really, really not enjoying it and I was annoyed that my expectations based on the first half of the book were dashed on the rocks of predictable plotting and a rushed ending.
This is one of those stories of a protagonist whose hard luck life just keeps getting harder and harder. In this case, the protagonist is Megan, a little girl who belongs to a race of people who all have latent magical powers. She lives in a city ruled by a more or less evil overlord, and is cared for by her loving Mama and Papa, who both work as weavers. Her Papa is in line to become the next head of the weaver’s guild when his rival takes advantage of a riot to maim him so that he can’t weave anymore. Both parents are cast out of the guild and they have to move into the slums.
In the slums we learn more about this world, which is supposed to be our own 3000 years in the future after some sort of apocalypse, I think. Homosexuality is a-ok, group marriages are normal, you can’t work unless you belong to a guild, and only the rich actually get to stand trial— everyone else accused of breaking the law goes directly to the dungeons. Megan’s mom manages to get herself apprenticed to a jeweler who secretly works for the Thieves And Merchants Guild. Her husband gets apprenticed to the Storytellers Guild and with Megan running around with a street gang and stealing bits of glass and metal to sell, they manage to make ends meet. They have intermittent run-ins with her aunt, who is an abusive drunk, and her cousin, who is the target of the aunt’s abuse.
Eventually Megan reaches the ripe old age of 9 and they are fearing that it might be too late to get her apprenticed. Luckily the Thieves and Merchants guild is there, making lots of promises that they’ll definitely train her to be the latter rather than the former. Megan excels more at stealing stuff than running a pretend company, but she does well at both. Then Megan’s dad gets imprisoned during a random sweep of the street he works on. Since there is no way to challenge an arrest if you aren’t a noble, Megan and her mom are left with no choice but to try to bribe the head guard. They borrow a bunch of money and Megan’s mom sleeps with the guard, but the next day her dad is publicly executed by rats as part of the evil overlord’s wedding celebration. There was no execution by rats at my wedding. Megan is understandably not happy about the guard leading her mom on, so she rounds up the street gang to capture and maim him.
Megan finally hits 12 and— let the awkwardness begin. She’s been wanting to marry two guys from her street gang for a while now, and has one of her fellow apprentices in mind as a wife too. The guy she favors more, Serkai, is an apprentice guard. Surprisingly, the book doesn’t actually rub in the whole “their love is doomed!” bit at all and seems to trust that the reader is smart enough to see the problem with Megan’s plans. But their relationship is kinda cute in that awkward first love sorta way, and they go on a couple of dates. Suddenly, explicit sexual activity! Between 12 year olds! Thank you, book, I hate it when a novel makes me feel like a pervert.
Anyway, Megan’s mom becomes a drug addict and dies, forcing Megan to move in with her abusive aunt. There’s many scenes of the aunt getting drunk and being awful that are kind of a slog. Then the aunt gets fed up with Megan and sells her to a un-guilded ship captain. At first Megan thinks that she’s just going to be trained as a crew member but no, the captain is an old pervert who rapes children. This is where I lost my patience with the book.
Yes, sexual assault happens to a shockingly high number of women. Yes, it’s an awful thing. That doesn’t mean that every time you write a story in which awful things happen to women, rape’s gotta be in there. Megan’s had a pretty hard life already, being taken away from a promising career and sold into slavery is bad enough. Having her get raped over and over again isn’t necessary. The passage where she’s bleeding down to her knees felt less like the author telling a story and more like the author phoning in the angst. I really hated it.
Megan spends 3 years on the ship and despite being a sex slave she ends up running it in all but name due to the awesome training she got from her guild. Eventually she gets pregnant, which makes her body just adult enough that the captain no longer finds her attractive. After trying every herbal concoction she and the ship’s medic can think of the abort the fetus, she carries to term. Her uterus is too badly scarred from giving birth so young, so the son she gives birth to is the only child she will ever have, so she decides to ignore his parentage and love him. But you know by now that it can’t possibly last, and sure enough, the baby is sold into slavery.
This finally prompts Megan to murder the son of a bitch captain and stage a mutiny, which ends up with her in charge of the ship. She fails to catch up with the person who bought her baby, so instead she heads back to Evil Overlord City and rejoins her guild in hopes of being able to use their resources and expertise to get her son back. They promote her to a journeyman merchant based on how well she did trading while she was a slave and tell her to go rescue her cousin. And that’s where it ends.
The book really just became an unbearable slog at the end. Part of this is due to being a mother with a baby the age of Megan’s son, but not all of it. The scenes on the boat manage the awkward dance between being hard to force yourself to read and feeling extremely rushed. It was really a crappy way to cap off what had been a mildly entertaining little fantasy book.
