The characters in this book were really good and so full of personality, but unfortunately the rest of the story was really hard to get into.

The premise of this book is fun, but Delly's attitude grated on me in such a way that I stopped reading rather than look ahead for the character development. I'd be happy to read more by Waggoner, even more in the same universe, but Delly wasn't for me

Quirky, fun, and surprising--I had so much fun reading this!

I wasn't sure what to expect. Waggoner has built a fantasy world that seems to be set historically in a Victorian-esque period where the divide among classes couldn't be more prominent, identity and romantic interests are fluid, and magic is a gift bestowed on a few!

Delly is a girl born in a dustbin in the ally behind a brothel (aka not the wealthy part of town) and she is constantly struggling to pay rent and keep her mother off of the red drip. Of course, it doesn't help that her landlady can cast a wicked binding spell for her rent that will cause her to break out in pustules if she doesn't pay on time!

So when Delly is looking for a way to earn some quick cash, she stumbles across the need for a band of female wizards to protect a wealthy lady as she prepares for her wedding. The band of women couldn't be more strange--but they are just the sort to protect their charge from someone who seems intent on attacking her.

Soon Delly and the others are embroiled in quite an adventure as the case takes twists and turns that lead Delly closer to her home than she realized. She may just be able to afford her rent, save the lady in waiting, and rescue her mother while she's at it!

I loved how delightfully strange this book was! The hardest thing to get used to was the writing, or I should say the dialogue. Delly and the others adapt their speech quite a bit depending who they are speaking to and it took a bit to get used to their style. Once I did, I really had so much fun!

The magic in and of itself was secondary to the other parts of the book, which is a world in which people don't seem to be thrown by a half-troll-half-woman, a shape-shifter, a mouse skeleton who seems to be alive, and much more. The characters that inhabit this world are refreshingly open to one another and to finding a connection with any creature, male, female, or otherwise.

Fans of historical fantasy will love this story! Thank you to Berkley for my copy. Opinions are my own.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free advanced copy of this book to read and review.

I struggled through this one, unfortunately. I enjoyed the idea, but the story just fell flat. The beginning was a tad confusing and the plot felt extremely slow-paced.

Very intriguing and nice pace! The characters were well rounded as was the world building. Would recommend to my patrons.

I wanted to like this book I really did, but it sounded so juvenile and flat to me that I couldn't get very far at all. Thank you though for the early access!

Overall

If that title doesn’t immediately catch your attention, I’m not sure there’s any hope left for you. You should question your life decisions, because that title is just *chef’s kiss*. It pretty much tells you everything you need to know about this book.

The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry is humor mixed with historical fiction mixed with fantasy. In a gritty, 1800s-inspired world filled with magic, a group of women team up to solve a crime.

I haven’t seen this book talked about that much, and I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why. This book deserves all the love and then some! C. M. Waggoner apparently has a previous book set in this world called Unnatural Magic, but I didn’t know that before I picked this one up, and I don’t think it’s necessary to read it first (though I do want to read it now!). The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry works brilliantly as a standalone, even though I wanted a little more world-building in it. Other than that, though, I just loved these women and this story!

My Thoughts

- Dellaria (a. k. a. Delly) makes for a funny, relatable protagonist whose story I enjoyed. Anyone who has ever been poor will immediately recognize Delly’s plight. She’s faced with massive food insecurity, shelter insecurity, and lack of ability to hold a proper job. She was able to attend exactly one year of schooling, but it’s really reserved for the upper classes. Meanwhile, she sees her only real ability to survive to be conning people for a living.

Delly is utterly brash, sarcastic, manipulative, crude, and entirely a woman after my heart, obviously. Her voice is in a dialect that takes a little getting used to, but once you do, it adds so much personality to the character and depth to the world! She’s not necessarily what I would call a sympathetic narrator … unless you’ve been in that position yourself or understand the feeling that you’re up against a wall without any escape. She struggles a lot emotionally throughout the book as her needs and desires bounce up against what she considers right and wrong, which I thought made for a really interesting internal dilemma!

Plus … she’s a fire witch! If we’re all honest with ourselves, that’s definitely the best kind of witch … though I miiiight say it comes in second to a necromancer. Luckily, this book has one of those, too.

- This whole book is filled with interesting, compelling female characters who form their own unlikely squad. When I say “form,” I may be being a tad bit generous. Honestly, they’re all hired and forced to work together, which is absolutely the best sort of squad to start with. What can I say? I love the forced to work together trope.

Winn is the love interest and is really everything Delly is not: rich, capable, good at fighting, good at planning. She’s a solid sort with a really interesting family history and all around just a good person. I’m not even sure it’s possible not to like her character.

Abstentia is a slightly obnoxious upper class scientist who absolutely grated on my nerves to start with but who I learned to begrudgingly appreciate. I mean, despite her abrasive personality, she really is a top-notch scientist.

Mrs. Totham is the aforementioned necromancer! Don’t let her disguise as a helpless older, proper lady with everyone’s well-being at heart fool you. This character is Quirky with a capital Q. Also, her daughters are assassins, and I feel like that should say something about her child-rearing ability. I absolutely loved her character, and she was a close second favorite for me, just behind Buttons.

Buttons is really the star of the show for me. I could say more here, but really, you just need to discover Buttons for yourself. TRUST ME.

Each of these characters have something to add to the rather haphazard team, and while I can’t say they worked particularly well together, it sure was entertaining! I would absolutely love a sequel with these characters, because I just had so much fun with them!

- The F/F romance here is somewhere between insta-attraction and slow burn, with an almost doomed-to-fail tragic air about it. After all, what is Winn except a ridiculously wealthy mark for Delly, a way to rise above her station and secure a cozy life for her and her mother? Even as she realizes that wealthy ladies don’t consort with gutter slum like she is. Besides which, falling for marks is definitely not the sort of thing people like her do.

This romance is fraught with tension and drama in a will they/won’t they sort of way. Because emotions are complicated. Doubly so when class tensions become an issue. There’s a lot of class commentary in this book, particularly because the things the ladies take for granted are actually a big deal to Delly, who’s the only one among them with financial issues. If you like complicated, messy romances that don’t come easy, this will probably be a win for you!

- This is a dark, fantasy-filled world akin to 1800s England. Which makes it all the more important and shocking that it focuses largely on women. Now, the comparison to historical fiction isn’t quite analogous, since technically this is a fantasy world … a fact which took me way too long to realize. I actually thought it was fantasy overlaid on this world. Oops?

I did wish there was a bit more concrete world-building, as there were things that left me utterly confused that it seemed like I should know. Waggoner’s approach to the world is similar to the old “throw one in the deep end” method, and it worked for the most part. I had no trouble slipping into this world, and it felt real, expanded, and lived in, which is probably partly to blame for me assuming it was actually our world. There seems to be a sort of expectation in the way it’s written that the reader is already familiar with the world, even though they may not be. For example, there’s mention of a figure that I assume is their version of God (Elgar). Context is enough for me to figure out this is a religion, but I really don’t know anything more about it than that. This came up quite a bit with the slang, like releft and relefting as swears, but I didn’t know what they meant and thought I was missing something for the longest time.

What I most appreciated about the world is the way it tackles real-world problems like class differences and addiction, but in a setting slightly removed from the real world, so the reader is able to focus on the actual problem at hand. Delly’s mother, for example, is addicted to Drip, which is a dangerous drug that plagues the lower classes. The new formula, in particular, is especially deadly. Unfortunately, drug addiction is pretty universal across classes, as these women soon find out, which is a refreshing sort of dialogue to have. I liked how the book didn’t focus on these issues or make them preachy, but it definitely gave you plenty to think about!

Setting: sort of a gaslamp London-equivalent, but there's magic, and same-sex marriages are ordinary. Delly, a guttersnipe firewitch, being in need of money to keep herself and her drug-addicted mother housed, applies for a job bodyguarding an upper-crust lady. Joining her are a handful of other female magic-users, including a strapping lass with good (marital) intentions. The necromantic mechanical spider assassins are perhaps to be expected, but the plot does take an interesting left turn when the ladies start magically manufacturing illegal drugs. (It sorta makes sense, I swear.) I loved this book firstly because of Delly herself (potty-mouthed, opinionated, and highly money-motivated), and her interplay with her cheerful, rich, love interest, Winn. But, even more than that, the joy of it is the narrative, which is creative and laugh-out-loud funny. If you're bored of fantasy novels with bland prose, please read this book.

Check out my video review on my YouTube Channel (Josh's bookish Voyage).
https://youtu.be/mE7BbExXIso

Thanks to NetGalley for an e-arc of this in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This is an historical fiction book where women wizards with magical powers, almost like X-Men. Sadly, I had mixed feelings on this because it didn't really work for me. I really like the writing style and the way the story was being told. I liked our characters too; they were imperfect but intriguing. We follow one particular woman scam artist who tries to trick a wealthier woman, and their relationship evolves throughout the story. However, the story is focused on a group of these wizard women being hired to protect someone. Then it evolves into a murder mystery type detective narrative. That transition didn't quite make sense to me because I just wasn't invested in the plot.
3-3.5 / 5 stars. I liked the writing, the characters, even the romance, but the basic plot just didn't work for me. It was all just kind of basic. Even our characters, who felt real, seemed to fit into a more generic plot almost as if we have good characters forced to fit into a 1-dimensional framework. Then the setting didn't exactly work. It felt modern despite being supposedly Victorian.

I've tried to get into this story several times, and I just keep putting the book down without picking it back up. I don't know if it's the slow pacing or what, but this book is just not for me.

Overall, a pretty fun read, but I never did adjust to the weird liberties of language the main character perpetuated. I think it was supposed to be cute, but it read as obnoxious for me.

I found myself struggling to get through this one. I loved this book in the beginning it was a Victorianesque story with magic. However, the pacing was super slow and it took forever for anything to happen. Maybe I just expected it to move at a faster pace because of how it is described but I think there was more about them eating than action.

I am a character-driven reader so I have to be able to at least tolerate the characters. Delly our main character evolution is like a rollercoaster. Every time I started to like her she would do something that made me just not be able to stand her again. Winn is wonderful but there comes a point where I just wanted to shake her and say open your eyes. Then you have Abstentia Dok who in the beginning I never would have thought I would like her and at some point (around 70%) I realized she was the only one that I really liked.

The story isn’t bad it just did not jive with me. If you like slow-paced stories I say go for it.

'The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry' by C.M. Waggoner is an ebook about a petty con artist who gets wrapped up in a mystery.

Dellaria Wells has lost her mother and also can't seem to pay the rent, but she is a fire witch, so she takes a job protecting a wealthy client. It turns out that someone is definitely trying to kill the client.

There is humor, intrigue and romance. I felt like the novel foundered in the middle third as the story changed and details kept getting repeated. I did like it overall and I'm glad I read it.

I received a review copy of this ebook from Berkley Publishing Group and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this ebook.

I honestly don't have words for how much I enjoyed this - I loved the author's first book, set in the same world as this one, and Ruthless was easily as brilliant. I laughed so much, but the comedic elements are well-balanced by deep emotion and thorny issues like poverty and addiction. But one of my favorite things has to have been the different language styles of different characters - I don't know whether to call them dialects, maybe? But entirely different ways of phasing things, different slang - ix was seriously impressive.

No question, one of my favorite reads of the year.

Historical fantasy usually isn't my thing, but mix it with magic and I'm suddenly much more game! I love that Dellaria is a female bodyguard. It really turned that sterotype on its head. She is a strong female character, and I really appreciated seeing that. Even in the face of a little romance. I highly recommend this for historical romance fans that want a little extra in their stories.

I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as Unnatural Magic, but, really, it's quite good. It was so cool to finish Bk 1, & know there was another one ready to be downloaded & read!

1) Bk 1 was told from the point of view of 3 different characters, this book, just 1. It wasn't quite as intriguing, somehow. Undoubtably that was partly because the main character is not a very admirable person. She knows it! Her life has always been entirely about survival, not ethics. And she's a very good survivor. It's a major theme of the book that she's no longer satisfied with wallowing in it all, & she's hankering to become a better person, but doesn't really have faith that she can do it.

2) Still, she's snarky, and this book is even funnier than the 1st. Funny, unexpected situations & characters, & the running internal commentary of our heroine, Delly. A love of words, many of them made up. (Absentia.
Who would want to name their kid after the state of being absent?! ) I'm curious where she'll go with this series longterm; this book features the daughter of our 2 lovers from book one. Wynn, being part troll, has that whole "trolls LIKE to take care of other people" thing going for her.

3) Strangely enuf, there's not a whole lot of World Building going on in these books, & I didn't even mind! It's as if this (Delly's world) is just the world we all live in now, & you're just supposed to be savvy--or you're going to have to get caught up on your own. You know, like in real life, only they dont have google. It has that immediacy & grittiness of urban fantasy in that way (though I had the impression that urban fantasy had to have vampires werewolves & such. None of those here yet, though there is a skeletal zombie mouse called Bouncer (small spoiler there).

4) I was for some reason surprised that this book was going to be a murder mystery, too. Not my favorite genre. Well, a genre within another --but that seems to be where fantasy is going these days anyway. I've been enjoying some Steam Punk/Urban-Fantasy/Fantasy lately;) Who knew! At any rate, CM Waggoner does murder mystery very well, in my humble opinion, and I look forward with anticipation to her next book.

I greatly enjoyed the first installment in this world, Unnatural Magic, and was delighted to revisit it again. I found this to be a fun and engaging read overall, just bit in long in places.

I don't really read a lot of historical fantasy, but I found this charming! It's quirky and has a completely unique style that, admittedly, took a second to get used to, but once I did it was great. Very fun, enjoyable story, loved the relationship between Delly and Winn!

Thank you to NetGalley and Ace for an eARC of this title.

The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry was not what I expected. It is a very unique story about magic, lies, adventures, cons, and so much more. I honestly really enjoyed the world that was built. It was a Victorian era type of location filled with magic users of all kinds and some fantasy races as well. I found the magic and world super interesting and really wanted to dive into this one.

Unfortunately, I really struggled with the writing style of this story. This is definitely not an objective problem. I sometimes struggle with the way certain books are written and this one just didn’t jive with me. The book was written with a lot of slang and in a very conversational way, which I can see so many people loving. If the writing style was different, I know I would have devoured this book, but I just found it really hard to read.

I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who likes magic, sapphic relationships, historical fiction, and a little bit of necromancy.