Wizard's Daughter is an awkward story
that never feels comfortable in either genre - historical romance or paranormal. The first half deals with Nicholas Vail, the Earl of Mountjoy, meeting Rosalind de la Fontaine, a foundling girl who has grown up with 'Uncle Ryder' but whose first eight years of life are unknown. Rosalind and Nicholas find themselves thrown together almost immediately as they investigate a strange coded book with stories of wizards and other oddities. Rosalind and Nicholas are soon engaged,
but there are elements working against them.
The historical side of this novel
is poor, with the characters behaving most oddly for the period. Their speech and manners
aren't authentic, and that means that the story never truly engages the reader. It was hard to get a handle on either Rosalind or Nicholas; although occasionally being told what they
think, their overall characters don't come through. The peripheral characters are equally shallow.
The romance, if it can be called that, is non-existent. The pacing of the story
is also uneven, with some parts that drag considerably and loose ends left
untied.
The wizardry aspect comes more to the fore in the second half of the book but
is too complex to fit in the space available. By this point, the whole book had become too tedious for this reader to fully engage with, anyway.