Demon Daughter by Lois McMaster Bujold: Review by Liz Bourke
Demon Daughter, Lois McMaster Bujold (Subterranean Press 978-1-64524-219-2, $45.00, 224pp, hc) January 2025. Cover by Lauren Saint-Onge.
I first read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Demon Daughter when it was initially released in e-book. Now that it is coming out from Subterranean Press in hardcover – the latest of the Penric and Desdemona novellas set in the World of the Five Gods to do so – I have read it again for this review. It remains a gem of a novella, though perhaps it relies on the weight of previous familiarity with the series for its full effect.
Penric is a sorcerer and a learned divine of the fifth god, the Bastard who looks over all things out of season. Desdemona is the 200-year-old demon who shares his body, bearing the impressions of a dozen lives before Penric. Nikys is Penric’s wife and mother of his children, seven-year-old Rina and four-year-old Wyn. Penric is a scholar by preference, though in practice he is more of a sorcerous/religious troubleshooter, both for his religious order and for the Duke of Orban.
Otta is a six-year-old girl who has lived all her life aboard a Roknari ship. The Roknari do not recognise the Bastard as a god, only as a demon, and execute sorcerers. Otta contracts a demon, a very young one, from a rat. Demons, especially untrained ones, shed chaos. The ship catches fire. Otta is thrown overboard.
When a six-year-old child who only speaks Roknari washes ashore a few hours’ travel from Penric’s home and things start catching fire, it is a matter for Penric, as a sorcerer-divine, and for Nikys, as a mother and the more down-to-earth partner in their relationship, to handle. If Otta can learn enough control of her demon to travel safely, they may bring her to a saint of the Bastard who can either separate her from her demon – by destroying it – or who may, with the god’s assent, allow the demon to remain, so that Otta may be trained as a sorcerer, under Penric’s guardianship, and become a learned divine herself in time.
Otta does not know whether her ship sank after the fire. Penric does not know whether a Roknari ship captain would want a sorcerous daughter back. Otta also does not know that to remove the demon from her entails destroying it. Otta, once she is a little less frightened of what is happening, takes Rina’s helpful seven-year-old advice and names her demon ‘‘Atto,’’ the letters of her own name reversed. Otta is becoming attached to her demon, protective of it. Penric and Nikys are becoming attached to Otta. Desdemona is becoming attached to the idea of Atto: a child she might never outlive. But where does Otta’s best interests lie, and how can those be best respected along with her choices?
Demon Daughter is told partly from Otta’s perspective, partly from Penric’s, and partly from Nikys’s. Like all of Bujold’s work, it is beautifully written, with a deft and economical eye for prose. Bujold has always had a gift for a vivid turn of phrase, and it is a pleasure to watch an experienced master at their craft. This is a measured, thoughtful meditation on parenthood: on the agency of children and of parents, and what we owe them; on what it means to be a good parent, and how that might look different under different circumstances. Those of us with children may recognise some of our own dilemmas, cast in fantastical form.
It is an excellent novella, in an excellent series. I recommend it.
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Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, is out now from Aqueduct Press. Find her at her blog, her Patreon, or Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
This review and more like it in the January 2025 issue of Locus
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