Dust and Spores

Death's Daughter / Amber Benson
New York : Ace Books, c2009
359 p.

For the last few years I'd been in a state of bliss -- living under a self-imposed Forgetting Charm, because I so did not want to go into the family business. What I wanted was a glamorous career in New York City and the Opportunity for a normal life -- buying designer shoes on sale, daying guys from craigslist, Web surfing for organic dim sum for my boss. And then my father's Executive Assistant, a faun named Jarvis, showed up to tell me that my dad had been kidnapped.

Good-bye, Forgetting Charm. Hello, (unwanted) responsibility. Not only am I expected to step into the CEO slot on the company Board, but I have to "prove my worth" by competing against the Devil's protégé -- who's so hot in more ways than one. The contest involves finding three (why is it always three?) objects of power. In Hell.

One of them is this adorable puppy -- who happens to be a hellhound. The others are turning out to be not much fun. All this so I can take (unwanted) charge of Death, Inc.

My name is Calliope Reaper-Jones, and I'm death's daughter.

To start, I have to say I'm moving right now and for the past week have been lugging and washing and buying and waiting and cleaning and planning and doing pretty much everything a transient does every three years. It leaves little time for reading and zero time for blogging. (And I'm not even living in the place yet. This is why there is no Microbe Monday this week. I know you're so sad.)

So I actually read this book over a week ago at work on a day my computer died and nobody was around to fix it. (Pro-tip: This is awesome and if it happens to you, take advantage.) It's not fresh in my mind, therefore. In fact, I kinda don't remember it at all.

Granted, such is the way with chick lit, a genre term that the snobbish use pejoratively, but that I use because Amber Benson used it herself while we were speaking. (A book signing, I'm not like some sort of insider or Buffyverse stalker.) I don't read chick-lit because I am a boy and because lots of it is trashy, but I have read the first Sookie Stackhouse book on a plane as well as a good portion of Shopaholic Takes Manhattan while I was sick at my mom's place once, so I'm pretty much an expert now. And Death's Daughter, which I only got in order to meet Amber, wasn't half bad!

And honestly, that's a ringing endorsement considering how ready I was to dismiss the novel outright. Yes, like the Amazoners say, Calliope is shallow and whiny. This is definitely not a character-driven story. But Ms. Benson has been working for a long time with some top names in fic and comic book writing, not to mention sci-fi television, and it's rubbed off. She combines and modernizes different world mythologies (somewhat in the vein of American Gods) and uses some clever plot points. The Death Inc. angle was cute, if not as fleshed out as I'd like (get it? because like how death has no skin a lot of the time? I slay.), and there are a lot of fun, kooky characters that keep the pages turning.

And that's pretty much it. There's not a lot to say, really. While rough and a bit incongruous at times, Death's Daughter is surprisingly easy to read, which is good because at the rate things are going, this will probably be the last book I finish ever again.