OK, all of you who were taking bets on whether I’d love or hate The Demon’s Daughter can now close the books because the results are in: I liked. Liked it quite a bit, actually, but certain issues with the storytelling prevent me from giving it an outright A, though it’s still a keeper.

This is the first romantic steampunk novel I’ve ever read. The world is somewhat similar to Victorian England, in that there is a queen named Victoria and certain aspects of the culture distinctly resemble that of late nineteenth-century England, but there the resemblance ends. Like many SF/F novels, geography is compressed; on the same relatively small continental mass are countries that are analogues to real-world Mediterranean, African, Caribbean, Indian and Middle-Eastern cultures.

And then there are the Yama, humanoid beings in the coldest reaches of the far north. The humans call them demons, though not to their faces. The discovery of their advanced civilization is a relatively recent one when the book starts. The humans and non-humans are just barely beginning to learn to co-exist. One of the treaties struck up between Queen Victoria and the Yamish Emperor involves exiling the criminal lower-class demons (known as rohn) into the dockside districts of Avvar (think late nineteenth-century London with more diversity and fewer racial hang-ups). In exchange, the demons export their advanced technologies, such as electric horseless carriages, gasless lights and advanced surgical techniques.

But with an influx of criminals comes, well, an influx of crime. The problem is somewhat complicated by a few things:

1. Demons are stronger, faster and smarter than the average bear.

2. Demons are capable of draining a human’s etheric force, and prostitution based on energy vampirism becomes a thriving underground concern in Avvar.

Enter Inspector Adrian Phillips to help deal with these problems. A few years ago, he consented to having special implants inserted in his wrist which, when activated, give him demon-like strength and speed. This comes at a cost: many humans view these implants as abominations, and Adrian finds himself neither fish nor fowl nor meat. In fact, his wife divorces him because of these implants; she fears that he’ll grow a forked tongue and tail as a result of the demon technology.

Because of these enhancements, Adrian is given the task of policing demon-demon and demon-human disputes. However, despite the advantage the implants give Adrian, he finds himself at the losing end of a knife fight one night while looking for a missing boy. Dizzy from loss of blood and exhausted from the aftereffects of activating the implants, he collapses in a garden.

The garden belongs to Roxanne MacAllister, the bastard child of a famous singer and stage performer. Sarah is right on one score: Roxanne is quite the tiresome paragon. She’s an artist who specializes in painting nekkid people and goes around wearing trousers because she’s so radical and different, see, but she also adopts street urchins and rescues grubby, bleeding, unconscious men whom she finds in her garden, in the pouring rain.

Roxanne and Adrian develop the instant hots for each other. And I do mean instant. Erections and gushing moistness abound within minutes of them seeing each other, and lemme tell you, Adrian is able to sport a most impressive woody despite losing God knows how much blood and being only semi-conscious for much of the initial canoodling.

Roxanne is practically vibrating with glee at the idea of finally losing her virginity, but then disaster strikes: she finds out that her father is actually Lord Herrington, the Yamish ambassador to Avvar. Angst ensues. Oh nos! She’s half-demon! And what if she accidentally drinks somebody’s energy? Woe woe woe. But hey, it explains her funny-colored eyes, her amazing strength (bitch single-handedly carried Adrian into her house and she NEVER questioned where her amazing strength came from) and her propensity for mathematics (hey, is she part Chinese too?). Roxanne’s father’s is determined to become better acquainted with his daughter, but she’s not quite as enthusiastic about the idea.

At any rate, Adrian boinks her to a fare-thee-well, even after finding out about her demon father. Additional complications arise when Adrian goes back to work and is warned by his superintendent that associating with dodgy types like Roxanne won’t help with his police career. Adrian tries to stay away, but Roxanne’s supah-sexiness and her all-round awesomeness means he eventually tells the superintendent to fuck off and helps Roxanne out with a sticky situation—with predictable results.

There’s also a side-plot involving a fiendish demon known as The Dragon who’s performing wacky experiments on humans and demons, but unlike previous Emma Holly suspense side-plots, this one didn’t annoy me too much.

OK, so those of you who read Sarah’s F review are probably dying to know: why the drastically different grade?

Frankly, I think it boils down to the fact that I liked Adrian quite a bit better than Sarah did. One of the biggest stumbling blocks for her was how Adrian tried to break up with Roxanne despite how patently awesome she was. Personally, I understood why Adrian tried to do so. Keep in mind that a lot of the mores in Avvar were supposed to be similar to the mores of Victorian England. Two big reasons why I found Adrian’s attempt to break up with Roxanne sympathetic, not obnoxious:

1. He’s middle-class, but his family came from blue-collar working-class roots. Oftentimes, the people most rabid about social position and respectability weren’t the aristocracy; if one was rich enough and powerful enough, one could do whatever the fuck one wanted and other people just had to suck up the consequences. (Think about what royalty got away with, for example.) For the middle class, though, the stakes tied to one’s reputation were much, much higher on a personal scale. Adrian not being comfortable with the idea of dating, much less marrying a) a half-demon bastard of b) a notoriously slutty singer who c) lives in a bad neighborhood and furthermore d) has engaged in what amounts to pornography in e) an era amazingly restrictive and repressed about class, sex and illegitimacy makes perfect sense for me. In fact, I’d be puzzled if he’d had no reservations at all about associating with her. It wouldn’t have been convincing for someone from his era, background and values.

2. He’s really, truly dedicated to his job and wants to get ahead. Part of this entails marrying and associating with the right people. I’ve bitched hard before about how unconvincing I find it when a hard-nosed spy/businessman/cop whose work is his life abruptly tosses everything over for True Lurve without any apparent qualms. That Adrian thought of his job first and foremost made sense to me; after all, at that point all he knew from spending one week with Roxanne was that he liked her and that they’d had amazing nookie. So again, Adrian in this instance acted convincingly for somebody in his situation. I mean, hell, he loved his ex-wife and he got the implants in his wrist to get ahead, even though he knew they would likely freak her out; attempting to break things off with Roxanne before they got too serious made sense to me. In fact, I would’ve been puzzled if he’d been willing to defy his boss and ruin his career for the sake of a woman he’d known only one week.

And then, of course, about 20 pages after Sarah stopped reading, Adrian did the right thing, which cost him dearly. The fact that he came to this decision after a lot of struggle makes the sacrifice a hell of a lot more meaningful, and I’ll admit I teared up a little and sighed a bit.

The world-building in this book is quite excellent—better than just about any paranormal romance I’ve read, actually. Sarah thought it was pretty confusing (and some of our readers agreed with her), but I loved it and didn’t have any problems following along. I have only two complaints with it:

1. I wanted more. The little hints about demon culture and their highly stratified society were delicious, but I wanted more detail.

2. This is a nitpick that is by no means limited to Holly, but: what the hell is up with the dumb-ass names, man? Avvar for a London analogue? Why didn’t she pick something that sounded British, at least? And some of the names of foreign countries just sound far too similar to each other to denote distinct cultures and geographic spaces. Fantasy authors do this all the time, though, with Robert Jordan being one of the worst offenders. But then not everyone can build worlds like Tolkien—my reservations about Lord of the Rings aside, the man was a genius when it came to giving each region distinct, realistic names, languages and cultures.

Side note: Was anyone else as distracted as I was with the use of the word “daimyo” to denote upper-class demons? ‘Cause every time I read that word, I couldn’t help but picture this:

I don’t know if Holly’s use of this word was deliberate because she wanted in some ways to emulate the rigid hierarchies of feudal Japan, or whether she made up a word that just coincidentally meant something in Japanese.

Those are petty nitpicks, though. My biggest reservations with the book had to do with the overall tone and the erotic elements.

First, the tone: Holly has a very American writing voice. This is something I’ve learned to ignore with most romances set in England, and as long as no egregious errors are made (such as having eighteenth-century English aristocrats say “OK”) I’m usually fine. In this case, if the voice had been consistent throughout, the story was good enough that I would’ve been able to ignore it much of the time. However, the extremely American tone was occasionally interrupted by attempts to sound British, which jarred me.

The erotic elements were similarly jarring. Roxanne and Adrian’s instant lust for each other was ludicrous, not sexy. The dude was stabbed, for crying out loud. Couldn’t he rest for a couple of days before sporting blue-steel boners that would’ve made John Holmes envious? The sex became more convincing later in the book and the relationship between Roxanne and Adrian developed, but those early encounters made me laugh instead of turning me on. One graphic description of Roxanne’s camel-toe (a result of her tight pants) had me howling so loudly that my husband looked up from playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to ask me what the hell was going on.

Overall, I’d recommend this book to people who enjoy steampunk, and to those who are willing to overlook some very silly sex and a hero who acts like a bit of an asshead for part of the book. It’s a fun, sexy read, and I really hope that Holly sets more books in this world; if nothing else, I’m very curious about what happens to Charles, one of the street urchins Roxanne adopted and a former child prostitute.