Re: Looking Back: RI 2024

On 12/31/2024 9:05 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

Looking back over the year, and going through the reviews I've
posted, I think the following are my best RI 2024 books.

...

These are in more or less chronological RI order, not rank order.
I might rate this one as the most-fun book I read this year.
You wouldn't give it to your maiden-aunt, but Davi will keep
you listening while she reddens your ears & talks them half off:
 How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying
(Dark Lord Davi Book 1)
by Django Wexler
https://amzn.to/3VRC7fZ
 I first encountered Django Wexler with his Flintlock-Punk series
The Thousand Names.  Well, this is completely different, but just as
good.
 Davi (if she has a last name, she has apparently forgotten it) thinks
she is from Earth, and was probably a nerd, but now, after over a thousand
years of lives, she has trouble remembering anything about her first life.
 All she knows is that her troubles started when she regained consciousness
in a scummy pond in the woods where a wizard pulled her out and announced
that she was the chosen one prophesied to save the human kingdom from
the marauding "Wilders".
 She could just never figure out *how*.  Every path she took led her to death
(often prolonged & painful) at the hands of "The Dark Lord", exiting life
with the Kingdom falling and reawakening in that damn pond.
 After several hundred lifetimes, she has had her belly-full of it and decides
that *this* time things will be different.  To start with, while she always
dies at the hands of the Dark Lord, it's not always the *same* Dark Lord,
so there's obviously some kind of choice point out there somewhere: Why not
Dark Lord Davi?  She kills and robs the wizard and sets off into Wilder
territory.  It takes her a half dozen quick & painful trips back to the
pond before she figures out how to make a Wilder band accept her (it helps
that unlike most humans, she can eat the magical Thaumite stones as Wilders
do) and set out on her path to Dark Lordship.  In the beginning she is
helped by her general knowledge of the shape of coming events, but past
that, she must depend on her ability to wing it (aided by the fact that
despite her odd and devil-may-care aspect, she is smart and vastly experienced)
and judge character.
 Not that she's perfect at that, the knowledge that she's probably heading
for an early and protractedly painful death have made her prone to take
pleasure where she can find it, and while she knows that she probably shouldn't
sleep with the help, the understanding that she will be around to face the
consequences this time comes a bit late to her.
 Still she has, against all the odds, increased the size of her little
band and made it to the Conclave.  Well, every now and then, a dog
catches the car -- now what?
 This book is one of the most fun I have read this year.  Davi's story
is told in snarky first person, with the most footnotes(*) I have encountered
since _Happy Hour of the Damned_ (more than Vance, for sure).  She is
shielded somewhat from the full realization of all her betrayals by her
conviction that everything will "reset" with no-harm-no-foul, and when
she comes to see that might not be the case this time, it does give her
pause, but fortunately does not dampen her narrative for more than a few
pages.
 We are promised that Davi's story is a duology, and I am quite looking
forward to the conclusion.
 (*) Actually this is one of the first (fiction)cases I have found where
     reading in hardcopy would clearly be superior to reading on Kindle.
     I often found that by the time I got to the actual footnote page, I had
     forgotten what the reference was to.

...
I am tempted, snarky teenagers (Buffy !) are fun.  Although, I am now getting the evil eye when new books for me show up at our house.  I may have to get rid of the 200+ DNFs in my SBR soon.
Lynn