Review: The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry

The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In theory, I shouldn't have enjoyed this book.

The protagonist smokes, drinks too much, swears, has casual sex (even while pursuing a relationship with someone else), steals, and runs minor cons. Her brilliant plan to resolve the story problem involves cooking what is essentially magical meth (so as to get in with the villain, who is running a magical-meth operation). She has some reasons for all this, in that her mother was an addict, her father apparently absent, and she was brung up any old how in extreme poverty. One of the things that makes her likeable despite it all is that she doesn't use this as an excuse; she's aware that she makes bad decisions and takes responsibility for the consequences, and in the course of the book, though she still makes a number of bad decisions, she does start to make better ones. She's also not nearly as awful as she thinks she is; she has very low self-esteem. For example, she thinks she's unattractive, but that's clearly not the case, since multiple other characters are attracted to her in the course of the book.

The other thing that saved it for me was the voice. It's quirky, individual, and frequently hilarious, and it's delivered with very few flaws. Alarm bells tend to ring for me when I read that an author has a creative writing degree; whatever they're teaching in those classes, it's not basic mechanics or, as far as I can make out, much in the way of craft, and books from creative writing grads are often awful. In this case, either the author went to a particularly fine program, or she learned how to write independently of it, or she had an especially talented editor, or some combination of the three, because apart from a few missing capitals and a typo or two, the copy editing is excellent. There's nothing wrong with the structure, the emotional arc, the characterization or the worldbuilding, either. (I did spot one minor worldbuilding inconsistency; the small denomination of currency is the "sen," but at one point the characters pay for something with pennies.)

I did think for a while that the many dire warnings of how bad Delly's decisions were meant that this was going to turn into a tragedy, but happily it did not, allowing me to rank it in the Silver tier of my Best of the Year list. It's knocking insistently on the door of Gold, but the negatives I listed at the start of the review mean I can't quite bring myself to let it into that exclusive company. They also led me to wonder, as I was reading, whether I would read another book by the author, even though I was enjoying the voice of this one so much; by the end, I'd decided that I do want to read the previous book in the (apparently loose) series, which sounds like it's about how the parents of one of the characters in this book get together.

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