Death's Daughter - Geek in Review By: Joe Alfano Posted on: 3/6/2009

If you have spent any time reading my articles and postings up here, you are probably aware of the fact I am writing mostly Urban Fantasy these days.  Not-so-ironically I am also reading mostly Urban Fantasy these days.  When I heard that Amber Benson was releasing her first solo novel this past month that meant I was naturally drawn to it.  Drawn to it, but probably would have waited until the move into my new condo – which happens to be walking distance from both a Borders and a Barnes and Noble store.

Oddly enough, I saw through Twitter – although I am drawing a blank on where I grabbed the follow from – that she was asking people who read it to give their opinions and the like.  This was enough for me to say I could get one done in a week’s time.  For the record, I should have said a week to ten days as it is officially ten days since I purchased the book.

The beginning of the book is similar to the entry novel into a lot of series.  There is a lot of background information on the characters and the setting.  You need to establish at least a passing set of parameters for the world in which you are writing, and set the personalities of the main characters.  This means a slow start to the book.  For the record, I don’t think it is highly likely to do this form of setup without having it drag a bit.

In short, I am telling you if the first few chapters seem to drag or have a lot of 20-something woman inner monologue, keep reading.  I know this will shock you all, but I am not a 20-something girly girl type.  I know – it shocked me too!  But, as the story continued on, I started to really care about the outcome of this 20-something woman who was maturing as I flipped the pages.  Fine, she regresses once in a while in her banter, but I still do that too and I can barely remember 20-something.

Without spoiling too much, I will echo a statement from Amber on Goodreads.  The book really picks up when Callie goes to Hell.  The adventures she has during the course of this book really start to pick up speed the further you get into the book.  Keep an eye out for the turning point or you might miss it.

Of course, no piece of fiction is perfect, and Death’s Daughter is no exception.  There is a rather interesting method in the printing of the book to separate different sections of a chapter that threw me off at first, but I am now trained to look for.  By the end of the book this made sense to me, where it was alien at first.

Additionally there are some visible markers used in a couple of spots to annotate emotion (I would assume) that seemed to stand out and make me take pause.  I am not a fan of this method, especially when the book is written in the first person.  But that alone would not steer me clear of this book, or others in the same line.

And finally, in points it did seem that Callie seemed to have the voice of a teenager.  It almost seemed strange for someone who was a successful – if underappreciated – personal assistant in New York.  This is not to say that the voice didn’t fit the character, but it was a bit strange at times.  Of course the same could be said of anyone who ever listened in on my conversations throughout a couple of days.

All-in-all, I would rate this as a decent early work.  For those of you into the Urban Fantasy genre, I would liken it to one of the early Anita Blake books – you know, before they became romance novels with fur and fangs.  After putting it down, I felt it was an enjoyable read, and I will definitely be picking up the next in the series.

Hopefully by then I will be picking it up on a Kindle.  But that – as always – is another story.