Demon Daughter
Lois McMaster Bujold
Demon Daughter is book 12 in Lois McMaster Bujold's reliably entertaining Penric and Desdemona series. The stories take place in Bujold's World of the Five Gods and feature as main characters sorcerer Penric and his demon Desdemona. Penric either possesses or is possessed by Desdemona -- the relationship is complicated, but however you slice it, Pen and Des (as they call each other) are good companions sharing Penric's body.
The Penric and Desdemona books are like the world's best buddy-cop show. Thus I was apprehensive when the publisher's blurb mentioned "A six-year-old ship-lost girl draws ... sorcerer Learned Penric and his Temple demon Desdemona into conflict". I was not looking forward to suffering through a novella's worth of Pen and Des having a real fight. But I had faith in Bujold, and it was justified.
The story begins when a six-year-old girl becomes possessed by/of a brand-new demon. Subsequently she falls into Penric's care, and the difficult ethical issues raised by such a young child and such a young demon are of course vividly present in the minds of both Penric and Desdemona. It is about these that they disagree. But I will spoil no more!
Much of the story is told from the point of view of Otta, the six-year-old girl in question. Thus, we spend a great deal of time inside Otta's head, and this was, I thought, particularly well done. It's a very difficult thing for an adult to do well, to report from inside the head of an intelligent six-year-old. There are almost as many ways to get it wrong as there are authors who have tried it. But Bujold nailed it. Her Otta is not a small adult, she's inexperienced but not stupid, she's both fearful and happy when those things make sense, and she is not particularly cute.
Because we spend so much time with Otta, there is less of Penric and Des than usual.
Demon Daughter is one of the best of the Penric and Desdemona books.