Title: The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry
Series: Unnatural Magic: Book Two
Author: C.M. Waggoner
Publisher: Ace/Penguin Books
Length: 383 Pages
Category: Gaslamp Fantasy
Rating: 3.5 Stars
At a Glance: Delly Wells’ unique elocution was such a fun novelty, and the opposite-side-of-the-tracks romance between Delly and Winn was terribly, irresistibly sweet. The pace was slow-going at times, though, and I feel the magic system could have been better established. Fortunately, when the danger increased, the pacing of the story did as well.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Dellaria Wells, petty con artist, occasional thief, and partly educated fire witch, is behind on her rent in the city of Leiscourt—again. Then she sees the “wanted” sign, seeking Female Persons, of Martial or Magical ability, to guard a Lady of some Importance, prior to the celebration of her Marriage. Delly fast-talks her way into the job and joins a team of highly peculiar women tasked with protecting their wealthy charge from unknown assassins.
Delly quickly sets her sights on one of her companions, the confident and well-bred Winn Cynallum. The job looks like nothing but romance and easy money until things take a deadly (and undead) turn. With the help of a bird-loving necromancer, a shapeshifting schoolgirl, and an ill-tempered reanimated mouse named Buttons, Delly and Winn are determined to get the best of an adversary who wields a twisted magic and has friends in the highest of places.
Review: Dellaria Wells is a gutterwitch with a drug-addicted mum and the tendency toward earning money in a not necessarily respectable fashion. When she finds herself short of money and unable to pay her rent, her landlady gleefully puts a “hard promise” on Delly. Meaning if Delly doesn’t pay up by the promised date, with interest, she’ll be cursed with seeping pustules . . . mostly on the face. That’s how Delly becomes desperate enough to insinuate herself into the job of helping to guard a certain Miss Wexin prior to the event of her marriage. And that’s where Delly’s most recent set of troubles begin.
The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry is a book author C.M. Waggoner clearly had fun with. Delly is a charming and sympathetic narrator who, on the occasions where her vocabulary is found lacking, is wont to make up words to suit the situation and her need to express herself to readers, and I loved the verbal acrobatics that gave me lines the likes of, ”Right,” said the taller of the two fellows, and gave her a bit more of a shake than Delly thought was really needful before marching her off at a lockupwardly slant,” as the police were carting her off to the station with which she’s a bit too familiar thanks to some of her previous money-making schemes.
Delly soon discovers that the job she’s hired on to do will not be as simple and straightforward as she believed it would be. There are strange and terribly murderous things afoot on this journey, details she was not made aware of when she joined the other women acting as guards for Miss Wexin, including one Miss Winnifer Cynallumwynsurai—or Winn Cynallum, for short—who is half human and half troll, and is who Delly quickly marks as a prospect. Specifically, Delly means to endear herself to Winn in a romantical sort of way for the purposes of being taken care of for the rest of her life. Adding insult to injury, as the saying goes, Delly’s estranged mum (mum in title only, if we’re being picky), who happens to be addicted to a chemical called red drip, has a near brush with death when it becomes evident someone is brewing the drug in dangerous and potentially lethal ways. Getting into the drug cooking business was not part of the original bargain, but that’s where Delly and the other women find themselves as the plot thickens.
Delly’s mettle is tested time and time again, and she meets these challenges in specifically Dellywise ways. This book is densely written with plenty of enticing morsels that made me smile, sometimes chuckle outright, but that also worked against it at times. The effect of finding clever ways to say simple things tipped into feeling overly elaborate on occasion, and the story’s pacing—once the novelty of Delly’s quirky elocution was established and it was time to get to the meat of the story—lagged some as a result. The women are on a specific quest, and it took a rather circuitous route to get there. If the characters hadn’t been so appealing, and I hadn’t been invested in seeing where Delly and Winn’s romance went, this would have been merely an okay read for me.
I did feel as if I had some knowledge gaps in the world-building along the way, which it turns out I did. This is the second book in a -verse introduced in the book Unnatural Magic, which I inadvertently overlooked. While The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry is not a direct sequel to that book, some of the vocabulary (words such as rilifting and relefting, for example) were offered no origin, so I was left to infer their meaning without knowing where they came from. In addition, the magic system was unfortunately vague. Whether that would have been eliminated by my having read the first book in the pair, I can’t say. The delightfully dead and boiled mouse Buttons—yes, he’s zombified, for lack of a better word—did make up for a smidgeon of my frustration regarding the magic knowledge gaps simply for his existence.
Overall, despite its ups and downs, I was left satisfied by the story’s end. When the danger increased, the pacing of the story escalated as well, and the opposite-side-of-the-tracks romance between Delly and Winn was terribly, irresistibly sweet. Watching Delly fall for Winn without understanding that’s what was happening, Delly thinking that Winn was nothing more than a rich mark in a long-con even as Delly’s cold little heart pitter-pattered otherwise, was almost as lovely as Winn shyly and earnestly courting Delly. There was, of course, some bumps and bruised feelings along the way, but they find their way in the end.
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