Review of The Shamer’s Daughter (2015)
Seen in 2018.
A skammer, meaning a shamer, not a scammer. Her inherited power is limited to a narrow, close-range, line-of-sight telepathy, specifically the ability to observe what a person is ashamed of, and making that persion conscious of their shame.
Mostly low-fantasy YA adventure but there’s a dragon in it for no reason. Formulaic down to the Proppian makeover and the prince who’d be a great centerfold in Lisa Simpson’s Non-Threatening Boys magazine. The execution is dull, with too much moral polarization and not enough tapestries on the castle walls, but I like the slight, genre-friendly tweak to the tired special-teen premise. It does play right into the moral polarization when Dina uses it to turn a few hundred people against the psychopathic lord Drakan, but up to that point it’s an effective metaphor for the modern viewers’ reflective morality subtly colouring the crapsack fantasy world, while also being a great way to tie in a murder mystery without the classical bullshit Poe-style guesswork.