I Can’t Wait For…The Magician’s Daughter by H.G. Parry

Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted over at Wishful Endings to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about but haven’t yet read. Most of the time they’re books that have yet to be released, but not always. It’s based on the Waiting on Wednesday meme, which was originally hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine

This week my Can’t-Wait-For Book is The Magician’s Daughter by H.G. Parry!

The Magician’s Daughter by H.G. Parry
Genres: Fantasy
Published on: 21st February 2023
Goodreads

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 in a shipwreck 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. He himself leaves almost every night, transforming into a raven and flying to the mainland, and never tells her where or why he goes.


One night, Rowan fails to come home from his mysterious travels. When Biddy ventures into his nightmares to rescue him, she learns not only where he goes every night, but the terrible things that happened in the last days of magic that caused Rowan to flee to Hy-Brasil. Rowan has powerful enemies who threaten the safety of the island. Biddy’s determination to protect her home and her guardian takes her away from the safety of Hy-Brasil, 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 origins, and the cost of bringing magic back into the world.


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Along with a lot of other people, I absolutely adored A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians, Parry’s sophomore novel – and I am very grumpy that I haven’t had a chance to read the sequel yet. But damn it, I will MAKE time to read The Magician’s Daughter if I have to, because everything about it has me entranced and I am pining for it.

(The beautiful cover certainly doesn’t hurt!)

We already know that Parry writes wonderful historical fantasy, and the description is so tantalising – for one thing, Hy-Brasil is a name straight out of Irish mythology, one of many names for a magical island that was supposed to exist to the west of Ireland. I’m half-Irish and REALLY excited by the possibility that Parry might be drawing at least a little from that mythos – imo, Irish mythology is so under-utilised in Fantasy! But we know that Biddy makes it to London, and I’m curious about how that happens – meaning, why her adventures take place in London rather than Dublin – and what the…dynamic of the Ireland-England relationship will be like. (Spoilers for Irish history: it was usually fraught.)

The way Biddy’s described gives me the some of the same vibes as Miranda from The Tempest, particularly as depicted in Jacqueline Carey’s novel Miranda and Caliban. Except with much more mysterious origins…

And I’m not sure it’s possible to write a bringing-the-magic-back story that I won’t go heart-eyes for. I love that trope, and can’t wait to see what Parry does with it!

It’s definitely on my must-read list for 2023 – is it on yours?

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Published on December 07, 2022 12:39
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