2022 modern fantasy, first of a series. Niki McKnight has been widowed
for a year when her witchy grandmother dies and leaves her her house
on the Scottish borders. But somehow nobody will tell her exactly
what's going on…
One of the things I most immediately liked about this book was
that Niki, narrating in first person past tense, has very clearly been
a doormat to the world with a particularly vile husband… and comes to
realise it. That's a tricky thing to pull off, especially in first
person, and I was very impressed with how Day handled it.
Another neat trick: in the standard template for this sort of story,
Witchy Dead Grandmother would be all-wise and have lots of
(post-mortem) folksy good advice for Niki. But it gradually becomes
clear that she has messed up at least as much as everyone else has,
and with rather less excuse.
Yes, all right, Niki probably faces more impediment from her own
habits of agreeableness than from the machinations of the actual
opposition, who have assumed she'll be a pushover. But they have
reasons for making that assumption, and if this book is a fantasy of
situations that can be fixed by a middle-aged woman stepping in and
being Firm and Sensible, well, sometimes that's the book I'm in the
mood for.
The fantasy angle seems quite loose; I'm not at all convinced that
there's any underlying magical philosophy more than "what's needed in
the moment", and what we see of the worldbuilding is similarly
shallow, though great fun. But I enjoyed this, and I look forward to
more.