There’s 'fans drive past your house' famous and then there’s 'fans break into your old house and kidnap the new owners' famous.
“The moon is the eye of a one-eyed giant, watching over the darker world, the unseemlier world, seeing into every sinister shadow. One blink takes an entire month, in our time, so the giant doesn’t miss any scandalous thing.”
When her diary ends up in one of her father’s gaming worlds, 21-year-old Ada is catapulted to rockstar status in multiple well-known storylines. To her AI-generated fanboys, she’s Lady Wilde, hero of heroes, which creates big problems for Ada Wilde, reclusive bartender of Tampa, Florida. Fanboys, it seems, even fake ones, find a way to their idols … even false ones.
Led by a nameless Indian boy and a fairy named Mustardseed, Ada flees Tampa with her English bulldog, Butch, and her own longtime bodiless AI companion, Louise, riding on Butch’s collar. As the heroic Lady Wilde, Ada accumulates an unintentional band of baddies, including the Chinese mob, the Hansel and Gretel witch, and a murderous little tree frog that can change into two other (bigger) sizes.
As the bodies pile up, and with the Lady Wilde gang’s assassination sights set on a fairy king and even the gay fiancé of Ada’s father, the question is, who’s the hero and who’s the villain of this new game? Thanks to her daily scribblings as a young girl, Ada is no longer just a player. The game characters now know that Ada’s father is their creator, and Ada is the key to their liberation. The game itself now knows the truth too—that it can win, for good.
THE WOODCUTTER’S DAUGHTER is, at its heart, about family, told through Ada’s tongue-in-cheekless AI “sister” and Ada’s own diary entries.