Review: Death’s Daughter

Well, I keep seeing a lot of this concept, so I guess it’s fitting that there’s one in the Ginny Box…

Calliope has been living the past year as a personal assistant in New York City, waiting for her chance to get an in on the fashion industry. But then things turn weird, and she discovers that she has been living the last year under a Forgetting Charm. She is a daughter of Death himself, and now that he’s turned up missing, she’s the only option for her family to keep their immortality until he can be found. But it’s never that easy. She has three tasks to complete in order to earn her new title, and she has the Devil’s protege and her own family working against her. (There’s gratitude for you.) In the end, she has to figure out what the truth is, and what she really wants.

Okay, whew. Hard to try and summarize this book without spoiling anything…mostly because it’s hard to figure out where it is. The plot is a bit all over the place. But before I get into that, I have a style note that’s important. The way this book was written is very Princess Diaries, romance novel… annoys me to death… first person style. If I make it three chapters in this style and don’t want to kill the protagonist, it’s a miracle. But it’s also stupidly popular, so obviously I am one of the few who gets that level of irked by it. So I am going to try and remove myself from my hatred of the narration style and just focus on the actual story.

…which was a bit all over the place. Benson (known for playing Tara on Buffy, btw), actually set the bones for a good plot. Trials, love interest wants the same goal, family doesn’t believe in her/trust her… Good bones. But she kept getting tangled up in herself. To begin with, Callie was both a complete idiot and a crybaby. Now, when I say complete idiot, I mean she didn’t know things that I know are covered in multiple times in American school systems and even if they aren’t, they are enough part of the collective culture that she should have had at least a clue from that, and since this is part off her family’s business, I especially expected better general knowledge. I don’t mean I wanted her to be an expert, but she should have had some passing knowledge. And I like heroes who aren’t afraid of crying–look at Katherine in Threads if you don’t believe me–but Benson pushed it too far and had Callie a little too quick to either burst into tears or throw a hissy fit. You can write a feminine, overwhelmed character without pushing it that far.

I also wasn’t sure how I felt about the world building itself. There were a few components that I just didn’t think synced well with each other. For example, Persephone may have been Queen of the Underworld to the Greeks, but she was never a goddess of death. The Indian stories also got tweaked, but at least that was explained in verse. Then you have the Judo-Christian elements demanding immediate attention, but even that doesn’t fit with what the role of Death was supposed to be in this world. Overall, it was a lot of different mythos competing with each other and either too much or not enough explanation going on as to who was who. What’s worse is a lot of this information and a good chunk of the back story were given during info dumps, which are just hard to digest as a reader. Not that those back stories ever made a huge chunk of sense either…

There were some elements I did like of it. Talking Cerberus and his female pup, Griselda, were cute (I refuse to acknowledge the stupid nickname she got given). The kiss between the love interest with Siren blood and the protagonist being what breaks his hold over her because it was awful made me laugh. The relationship between Callie and her father was also really interesting to me, and I wish I had seen more of it at the end. Okay, I also loved hating her sisters and her mother. Honestly, I can understand why she left. Overall, there were also enough female characters that it gave us a good range of different personality types, so Callie didn’t have to be the Every Girl. Admittedly, it got pushed to the extreme, which seems to be the biggest flaw in Benson’s writing style, but it was nice to see such a wide range, since it was easily some of the best representation I’ve seen lately.

Would I pick up another book in this series, even if the narration changed to something more manageable? Probably not. Like I said, everything seemed pushed too far to the extreme for the sake of drama. It made Callie and the other side characters difficult to relate to, and it made it bounce all over the place in terms of plot. Add in the fact the narration style is one I detest, and this was  hard one to get through. This concept has become really popular in recent years–Deaths’ daughter assuming the mantle, struggling with its responsibility. I just think there are better options if that’s what you want to read for.