The Magician’s Daughter
Ratings25
Average rating4.1
A young woman raised on an isolated island by a magician discovers things aren’t as they seem and must venture into early 1900s England to return magic to the world in this lush and lyrical historical fantasy.
It is 1912, and for the last seventy years magic has all but disappeared from the world. Yet magic is all Biddy has ever known.
Orphaned as a baby, Biddy grew up on Hy-Brasil, a legendary island off the coast of Ireland hidden by magic and glimpsed by rare travelers who return with stories of wild black rabbits and a lone magician in a castle. To Biddy, the island is her home, a place of ancient trees and sea-salt air and mysteries, and the magician, Rowan, is her guardian. She loves both, but as her seventeenth birthday approaches, she is stifled by her solitude and frustrated by Rowan's refusal to let her leave.
One night, Rowan fails to come home from his mysterious travels. To rescue him, Biddy ventures into his nightmares and learns not only where he goes every night, but that Rowan has powerful enemies. Determination to protect her home and her guardian, Biddy's journey will take her away from the safety of her childhood, to the poorhouses of Whitechapel, a secret castle beneath London streets, the ruins of an ancient civilization, and finally to a desperate chance to restore lost magic. But the closer she comes to answers, the more she comes to question everything she has ever believed about Rowan, her own origins, and the cost of bringing magic back into the world.
For more from H. G. Parry, check out:
The Shadow Histories
A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians
A Radical Act of Free Magic
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I wasn't sure about this one at the beginning, but I ended up enjoying it.
Biddy has grown up on the island of Hy-Brasil. She lives there with her found family Rowan and his familiar Hutchincroft. Rowan is a mage with little magic. That's because almost all the magic has gone out of the world. But together, maybe they can bring it back.
I loved the found family element and the setting. The characters too. I loved the mage/familiar relationship as well. Loving, but also funny at times.
Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for an e-arc.
What an incredibly well written tale of magic. Deftly plotted and some of the best world building I've ever seen. I hope we see more of this world in a future book - and last but not least...Hutchincraft ❤️
THANK GOD IT'S OVER!!!
It was like chewing a piece of food, and it can't be swallowed, it just grows and grows and grows... but... just 200 pages. It won't take long. Just 100 pages. Just 15 pages... it's over, soon. Just one more word, and another, and... WON'T THIS CRAP EVER END!!!!
Ok, so you probably understand I don't like it much. Though I like the story. There were some nice bits in it. I liked the Puca bit and the solution to the thing.
But I didn't like Biddy at all. Well, I liked her in the beginning, but somewhere at 100 pages she became your typical teenage heroine and I hate those. Sorry, all the typical teenage heroines out there, it's probably me being autistic and never having been a typical teenager, but whatever it is, I hate you.
I didn't find her reactions to things to be believable. I think she is hypocritical. She accuses everyone else of lying to her but lies herself without thinking twice about it. She believes her 100+ years old “daddy” can't take care of himself, but needs her, a 16 years old girl who has never done much to take care of the “daddy” to that day - it was always “daddy”s familiar who did all the work there. She was just reading books and running around the island. And what's with the Japan love? Had it been explained somehow it would have been interesting spice to the book, but we are just thrown the snippet that Tokyo was the city she most wanted to visit, and a word, komorebi.
“At this time of year, the path was like a dark green cathedral, dappled with sun, and Biddy told the other two about the words the Japanese had for different kinds of light: Light through leaves was called komorebi.”
“Flickers first, like sunlight glimpsed through leaves, the light the Japanese called komorebi.”
