[Ren] Newt’s Emerald by Garth Nix

Title: Newt’s Emerald
Author: Garth Nix
Published: November 29th, 2013
Rating: 
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Magic! Romance! Intrigue! Mistaken identities! Swashbuckling adventures at sea! And much, much more in this short but delightful novel. When an evil magician steals the titular emerald (a priceless heirloom and powerful magical item) Lady Truthful Newington vows that she’ll get it back. However she quickly realizes that a young lady can’t run around London chasing jewel thieves, so she disguises herself as a man. Garth Nix says in the author notes at the end that he is a fan of Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer and Patrick O’Brien — and it shows. He’s having fun telling this story, and the result is an entertaining romp through Regency England.

I liked pretty much anything about this book, starting with the characters. Truthful is a sympathetic heroine, and while she was sometimes contrary and stubborn, she always was a lady of her time; Garth Nix didn’t fall in the trap of giving her modern sensibilities. I liked her interactions with her three cousins, and I particularly liked the elderly, fez-wearing, sword-cane-wielding great-aunt. The love interest started off by bickering with Truthful before clearing up all the misunderstandings, but the banter was enjoyable and the romance never overpowered the plot about the emerald. I was worried when he showed up that he’d take over all the adventuring and sleuthing, but Truthful was more than able to hold her own and the love interest wasn’t above admitting that Truthful saved his life more than once. Trust Garth Nix to write kickass female characters.

I was a bit annoyed at the fact that the quarrel between the love interest and Truthful went on for so long, when he could have cleared all misunderstandings with a few words, but that didn’t detract much from the story and I always like to read about matchmaking dowagers scheming in the background when the stupid young people are too busy pining to do anything productive. The one thing that did bother me was the several typos scattered in the book, it could have done with another round of editing. But, overall, a great short story and a must read for fans of the genre!

[Ren] The Tropic of Serpents (Memoirs by Lady Trent #2) by Marie Brennan

Title: The Tropic of Serpents (Memoirs by Lady Trent #2)
Author: Marie Brennan
Published: March 4th, 2014
Rating: 
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We were first introduced to Isabella Camherst in A Natural History of Dragons: she’s a young woman from Scirling (a place very similar to our Victorian England) whose dream is to travel the world and study dragons. In this second book of the series, which is framed like a volume of memoirs written much later in her life, Isabella tells the story of her expedition to the tropical continent of Eriga, to study arboreal tree snakes and swamp-wyrms. I had been waiting for this book ever since I finished the previous one, and I’m happy to say that it didn’t disappoint. If anything, I found this book to be even better than the first. Isabella’s expedition is plagued by accidents and unexpected events, and that made for a quick pace; there was hardly a dull moment in the book. I was halfway into the book and planned to read “just one more chapter” and then it was 3am and I had finished reading. It was that kind of book.

The location was, I thought, one of the main characters of the book. Marie Brennan described the swamp of Mouleen so vividly that I could forget it’s not a real place, I think this is quickly becoming one of my favourite fantasy world. The downside was that sometimes there was too much detail, all the names of places thrown around felt unnecessary and I had to read some passages twice or thrice to figure out which place was what, or give up and hope it wasn’t something vital to the plot. Still, once I figured out which people lived where and who was at war with them, the geographical and political background for the various people living in the area was neat. The customs of the Erigan people were described in great detail, but that happened bit by bit as Isabella and her companions found out about them, so it never felt as if we were getting an info dump just for the sake of an info dump; it all tied into the story and explained the characters’ decisions. Like with the previous book, there are black and white drawings here and there that are meant to be viewed as some of the sketches that Isabella made during the journey. They are really gorgeous and help establish the setting: it’s fantasy and there are dragons, but we’re firmly on the side of magical realism, and the dragons are really just a large and rather interesting predator species.

I really liked the bits about exploring and adventuring. I enjoy reading about real world naturalists and explorers like Charles Darwin and Alexander Humboldt, but it’s the first time I come across such an interesting fictional naturalist. Isabella is stubborn and headstrong and extremely passionate about her work, and I can’t help but root for her. Without spoiling anything, I felt that after the events of the first book she really matured: she still has a lot to go before becoming a world-famous naturalist, but now I can sort of see the path that she might take. I’m disappointed that Natalie and Mr. Wilker sometimes seemed to vanish in the background, but in hindsight it would make sense for Isabella to focus on the animals around her rather than her human companions, since being a naturalist is her defining character trait.

Overall, a great continuation to a great series and a must-read for me. I’m already looking forward to reading the next book and wondering where Isabella will end up next. Authors, this is how you hook readers: not with stupid cliffhangers, but with good writing, compelling plots, character growth, and a few mysteries here and there. (But what was that stone with the ancient carvings? I want to know!)

[Ren] Alchemy and Meggy Swann by Karen Cushman

Title: Alchemy and Meggy Swann
Author: Karen Cushman
Published: April 26th, 2010
Rating: 
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I’ve read The Midwife’s Apprentice and The Ballad of Lucy Whipple more times than I can count, so I was curious when I found out Karen Cushman wrote other books. Plus I was in the mood to read about alchemy. The setting is England in 1573, “after the ascension of Queen Elizabeth to the throne but before London’s first theatre and Shakespeare”. When Meggy’s grandmother dies, her mother sends her to live in London with her father. The book opens with Meggy, holding her goose Louise and her walking sticks, cursing her father very creatively. Master Ambrose has taken one look at her and claimed to have no use for a crippled daughter; he wanted a son to help him with his Great Work, creating the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life. Meggy is equally unimpressed with her new lodgings, and she things London is dirty and noisy and ugly.

I don’t want to spoil anything about the plot, because part of the book’s charm is exploring London and getting to know all the various characters along with Meggy, so I’ll just say that this was a short but very enjoyable read. Karen Cushman writes great books for children because she doesn’t dumb down her subject matter. The characters are well-rounded and not in the least stereotypical: Meggy, the protagonist, has a foul temper and a sharp tongue; her father is distant and only concerned with his work, but that doesn’t make him completely evil. The other characters too — Roger, the cooper and his son, the troupe of players, the printer and his family, and all the streetsellers — are colourful and turn the book’s world into a real place filled with all kinds of people.

The language threw me at first, because all the characters talk in archaic words and sentences.

Mayhap this was but a bad dream, she thought. The dark, the cold, the strange noises, and the unfriendly man who had judged her, found her wanting, and left her alone–perhaps these were but part of a dream, and she would wake again in the kitchen of the alehouse. “Sleep well, Louise,” said Meggy to her goose, “for tomorrow, I pray, we be home.”

And don’t get me started on the creative insults, which are positively Shakespearean. “Bloviating windbag” is probably my favourite. It took me a while to get used to the strange turns of phrase, but after some chapters I stopped noticing it so much.

Overall a great read, witty and never predictable. I’m sure if I’d read it fifteen years ago it would have been an instant favourite with me and Meggy would have joined Lucy and Alice as one of my childhood heroines. Karen Kushman has a talent for writing strong stories and great female characters with their own agency. Definitely a recommended read.

[Ren] The Perfect Kiss (The Merridew Sisters #4) by Anne Gracie

Title: The Perfect Kiss (The Merridew Sisters #4)
Author: Anne Gracie
Published: January 2nd, 2007
Rating: 
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Grace Merridew is the youngest of her sisters, who have all gotten hitched in the previous books. She was only ten or twelve when the series started, so there’s been a bit of a timeskip and now she’s of a marriageable age. Except that she doesn’t want to get married: she’s been out on the marriage mart for a couple of years, hasn’t met anyone interesting, and so she’s decided that if she can’t have an epic love story like her sisters she’s going to go abroad and see Egypt and the pyramids. Quite a sensible decision, if you ask me. However, a friend of Grace is being roped into an arranged marriage with some guy named Dominic Wolfe (cue an excess of Big Bad Wolfe jokes) so Grace agrees to pose as her friend’s maid while she visits the house of her husband-to-be. This being a romance, Grace and Dominic meet, fall in love, have sex, and get married. Roughly in this order.

First off, do not get me started on the stupid arranged marriage plot. Usually I like arranged marriages. It’s one of my favourite tropes. Any kind of arranged marriage, or marriage of convenience. I simply love the stuff. The more ridiculous the circumstances, the better. But this time even I couldn’t stomach the patent ridiculosity of the situation. There’s a really baroque contract that’s been signed ages ago by the fathers of the bride- and groom-to-be, which says Dominic has to marry this girl or else he’ll lose his inheritance. And the girl’s father can rescind his contract, but he won’t, even though he doesn’t know Dominic at all and Dominic threatens to neglect his future wife and take a mistress and bring a scandal on both of them if he’s forced into this marriage. It’s such a ridiculous and contrived plot device and I can’t believe that such a lot of balderdash could ever be legally binding… Whoops, I got started on the stupid arranged marriage plot.

Just for that, I can’t in good faith give this book more than 3 teacups out of 5. I had to force myself to ignore the stupid ~marriage contract~ whenever it came up or I would have never made it past the first chapter. Aside from that, the book is okay. I have come to the comclusion that I prefer it when the hero is a complete scoundrel, because that way I don’t have to deal with the author’s botched attempts to paint him as a saint. Dominic is a wicked young man who doesn’t think twice about pursuing his fiancee’s maid, and that’s fine by me. Grace has a sharp tongue, like I knew from the first book, and I really enjoyed her snippy dialogue with Dominic. I didn’t laugh out loud like with The Perfect Rake but I did snicker more than once.

Like all others in this series, this book also contained a tragic backstory (yawn) and a superficial beta romance (which was at least tolerable, Dominic’s friend provided a bit of comical relief). I’m happy that we got to see a glimpse of Grace’s sisters and their husbands at the end, though of course there was not enough Gideon. There never is. I am relieved that this series is over because there’s only so many times you can retell the same basic plot, but I’d go back in a hurry if Anne Gracie gave me a second book about Prue and Gideon.

[Ren] The Diviners (The Diviners #1) by Libba Bray

Title: The Diviners (The Diviners #1)
Author: Libba Bray
Published: September 18th, 2012
Rating: 
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Evie O’Neill is the quintessential flapper: a girl who likes jazz and speakeasies and has the power to guess people’s secrets by touching their possessions. Trust me, that’s what everyone did in the Roaring Twenties. Almost every character in the book is a Diviner, which is to say a person with special abilities. But I’m getting sidetracked. That’s another thing that happens a lot in the book, sidetracking. I’ll come back to it. After her power causes a bit of a commotion in her town, Evie is sent to live with her uncle in New York. All sorts of cool and interesting things happen in the city, like ritualistic serial killings. Uncle Will runs the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult and he’s helping the police investigation, and Evie decides that it’d be ~the cat’s pajamas~ to tag along to a murder scene. This in hindsight proves to be a terrible idea because mutilated corpses are gross, and also because the killer might be a little supernatural and a lot determined to finish the job. Really, Evie, anyone could have told you that it was a terrible idea.

So, about Evie. She’s not an easy character to like because she’s very spoiled and inconsiderate and her main concern for the first half of the book are her clothes and whether she can get drunk at a party that night. But, for all her flaws, I liked her a lot. She’s a far cry from the usual pure and selfless heroine, and sometimes I just need to read about a main character who says this is me, this is what I want, I’m doing it for myself and damn the consequences.

Some mornings, she’d wake and vow, Today, I will get it right. I won’t be such an awful mess of a girl. I won’t lose my temper or make unkind remarks. I won’t go too far with a joke and feel the room go quiet with disapproval. I’ll be good and kind and sensible and patient. The sort everyone loves. But by evening, her good intentions would have unraveled. She’d say the wrong thing or talk a little too loudly. She’d take a dare she shouldn’t, just to be noticed. Perhaps Mabel was right, and she was selfish. But what was the point of living so quietly you made no noise at all?

The supernatural murder plot was suitably creepy, and I wish I didn’t have such a vivid imagination because there were quite a lot of detailed descriptions of grisly murder scenes. The mythology that Libba Bray came up with was very interesting. In general, the whole setting is great and it did really feel as if I was living in the 1920s for a while. I’ve read some reviews that mention the overuse of expressions like “the cat’s meow”, “giggle water”, “pos-i-tute-ly”… I have to disagree, I felt that the use of those expressions was very appropriate. Because it’s Evie who keeps using those words over and over, and it fits with her character of bad teenage girl who annoys her elders by overusing slang terms. In terms of setting, this book is pretty much perfect for me.

My only problem, and it’s a big problem, is that there are a lot of useless sidecharacters and subplots that go nowhere. The author had a story to tell, and it was a cool story, with a definite beginning and a middle and an end. But because this book is the first in a series, there are a lot of chapters that do nothing but set up plot points that (I assume) will be resolved in the next books. Take Memphis for instance: I like him but he has almost no connection with the main plot, the pentacle killings. Every couple of chapters the action grinds to a halt because we have to go and see what Memphis is up to. I more or less skipped one of his chapters towards the end because another murder is happening, someone is dead, I do not care that Memphis is writing sad poetry in his journal! I like books with lots and lots of characters, but in this case I felt as if the pacing suffered because of all the characters and story hooks that the author was trying to cram into it.

Without all the pointless extra characters and plots, I would have given this book 4.5 out of 5 teacups. As it is, it’s a 3.5 at most: it was exhausting to get to the end of it, especially because the last chapter is a series of vignettes of all the minor characters and all unresolved subplots, and I hope you paid attention to the unnamed girl with green eyes who served Evie dinner thirty chapters back, because it looks like she’s a Diviner too! I’m not sorry I read this book and I would recommend it to fans of this time period and of paranormal, but I don’t think I’ll read the sequel. Also because the cover of the sequel is different and not nearly as pretty as this one. The second book in the series, Lair of Dreams, will be released this August.

[Ren] The House Girl by Tara Conklin

Title: The House Girl
Author: Tara Conklin
Published: February 12th, 2013
Rating: 

When I read the premise, I thought I’d love this book. When I read the first chapters I realized I wouldn’t. The House Girl is an extremely dull book. There’s no way around it. The idea is intriguing: two parallel plot lines, a slave girl in 19th century Virginia and a present-day lawyer working on a class-action lawsuit for descendants of slaves. I’ve no doubt that the right writer could spin a compelling tale with that, having the narratives complement each other until they’re joined at the end when Lina finally finds out what happened to Josephine. Unfortunately, Tara Conklin is not that writer.

The prose is needlessly meandering. The reader is subjected to endless descriptions of, well, everything, until each scene is so bogged down with the description of the settee’s brass buttons and you’ve quite forgotten what’s even going on. I admit I started skimming about halfway through, but I don’t think I missed anything, because everything is repeated. Several times, in fact, if the author really wishes to hit you over the head with it. For example: the book will often make the point that (gasp!) slavery is bad.

The problem is that despite all the flowery descriptions I don’t know anything about the characters. They’re flat, a caricature of themselves. Take the character of Dorothea, for example, a third POV that appears halfway through the book (because Josephine’s narration was the only one even remotely interesting and so had to be suppressed). Dorothea lives with her father and mother. She writes letters to her married sister, talking about how they help fugitive slaves. There’s pages and pages of fake “letters” from Dorothea, and from those I have learned absolutely nothing about Dorothea’s personality, about what she’s like, her dreams and hopes. Yeah, she helps slaves, she wants to be an abolitionist, but if you take that away, she is nothing. Her family is equally unsubstantial.

It feels as if the author had a story to tell, and everyone and everything is a prop that must help the story along, no matter how implausible some bits will be in hindsight. Josephine says that the first time she ran she came back because of a pain in her side. Later we find out that it’s not true, she reached Dorothea’s family but decided to go back. It makes no sense for Josephine to be an unreliable narrator, so why would her memories be wrong? Yes, but we couldn’t mention Dorothea the first time around because she only appears halfway through the book, and Dorothea had to have met Josephine at some point because she had to write about her in her letter that Lina would read a hundred years later… Instead of having the characters shape the plot, it’s the plot that orders the characters along, making everything happen by means of contrived coincidences.

I’m sorry about giving this book one star only, because I still think that with a shorter page count (perhaps as a novella) the plot might have been salvageable. But the big revelation at the end about Lina’s mother? Yeah… Saw that coming.

[Ren] The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani

Title: The Blood of Flowers
Author: Anita Amirrezvani
Published: June 5th, 2007
Rating: 

Persia, 17th century. The life of a fourteen year old girl is changed forever when her father dies, leaving her without a dowry. Together with her mother she travels from her village to the city of Isfahan, to become servants for her wealthy uncle. The title refers to the flowers that were used to create dyes for the brilliantly woven Persian carpets. The girl is a brilliant carpet designer… and it took me several chapters to realize that her name is never mentioned in the story, not even once. She narrates it in first person and the other characters never say her name, but somehow it doesn’t come across as forced. The author says in the notes that she wants the protagonist to represent all the nameless artisans whose names are lost to time.

I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, the backdrop of 17th century Iran was fascinating, that alone kept me glued to the page and I finished the book in just two days. However it left me somewhat unsatisfied, because there is no “traditional” ending like one might expect. There’s a definite feeling that the protagonist is still there, living her life, and we can only imagine what happens after the book is over. Likewise, a lot of “bad” characters make the protagonist’s life miserable and get away scot-free. I was expecting that, especially since they’re not as much “bad” as “following a moral and social code so different from my own that it’s hard to understand”, but come on, read the book and tell me you weren’t hoping that the blasted comet will fall down on the evil aunt’s head!

Another gripe I had was that the protagonist just couldn’t catch a break. When it wasn’t society rules that brought her down, she was herself causing trouble. That might add to the realism, since life was tough for women of the time, but as a modern reader it feels as if something’s missing. Oh, and a little glossary wouldn’t have gone amiss, because how many times does the narration need to halt to explain that Khanoom is the respectful term used to address a married woman? But those are niggles, really, I liked the book overall and I’d suggest it to anyone who’s a fan of coming-of-age stories and gorgeous settings.

[Ren] Silhouette of a Sparrow by Molly Beth Griffin

Title: Silhouette of a Sparrow
Author: Molly Beth Griffin
Published: August 13th, 2013
Rating: 

If you’re like Isa, all I need to say about this book is “lesbian flapper romance”. If you’re not, well, Silhouette of a Sparrow is the story of Garnet, a sixteen-year old girl living in America during the Roaring Twenties. Garnet loves birds and wants to study ornithology, but she has to settle for cutting their silhouettes on paper — the only bird-related activity that her mother considers appropriate for a young girl. Her mother wants Garnet to marry, but she’s not one of those dreadful book parents who try to force their offspring into a loveless match just to create conflict. A marriage is pretty much the only way Garnet can have financial stability, and she knows that. She goes to stay in the country with her dad’s cousin and decides to make the most of it, knowing that once she goes back her boyfriend will propose, and she’ll say yes.

That’s where the book starts. It goes on to describe Garnet, her paper birds, her wish to visit the amusement park despite the prohibition from her oppressive guardian… and then the chance meeting with a young dancer, Isabella, which throws all of Garnet’s plans and ideas for the future into disarray. The story is lovely and has a dreamlike quality that immediately drew me in. I don’t know how to describe it precisely, the closest I can say is: I read this book in the middle of winter but it felt as if it was a lazy summer afternoon and I was on the lake with Garnet and Isabella.

The ending is unexpected and bittersweet, but quite perfect, and that’s all I can say without spoiling it. I’d definitely recommend it for anyone who’s looking for good, non-porn LGBT books. (Not that there’s anything wrong with porn. But there’s a dearth of good LGBT books for teens.) And it passes the Bechdel test with flying colours! That always pleases me.

[Ren] Why Kings Confess (Sebastian St. Cyr #9) by C.S. Harris

Title: Why Kings Confess (Sebastian St. Cyr #9)
Author: C.S. Harris
Published: March 4th, 2014
Rating: 

Why Kings Confess is the ninth book in C.S. Harris’s series of regency mysteries. I was going to make a post about the first books or maybe a series overview, but I figured I might as well talk about it here. Each book in the series is largely formulaic: there is a murder and Sebastian investigates, moving from the glittering ballrooms of the aristocracy to the poor houses of the East End in his quest for justice. This time the plot starts with Sebastian’s friend Gibson stumbling over the body of a young French doctor; the police insists that it was the work of footpads, but Sebastian isn’t so sure, especially when he finds out that the victim was in England as part of a delegation sent by Napoleon, and the (now-deposed) French royal family might also be involved… Something like that, murder with a dash of historical characters. However, far from becoming dull and repetitive over time, this series has sucked me in and I’m already looking forward to the next book.

The two main draws for me are the setting and the characters. I’m really nitpicky about historical novels because I read a lot of them and I can usually spot if an author has done her research or if she’s just talking about ladies in fancy dresses. C.S. Harris really knows what she’s writing about, there’s a great attention to details and the setting feels genuine. The characters too: Sebastian has somewhat modern sensibilities, for example in his attitude towards sexism and democracy, but he still acts and talks like he’s from the 19th century. This is also true about my favourite character, Hero Jarvis. In another book Sebastian makes the following observation about her: “however scornful Miss Jarvis might be of society’s strictures, she was still careful not to fall afoul of them”.

Hero, like countless other female characters, has realized that the rights of women in regency England are sorely lacking, and so she’s decided that she’ll never marry and instead she’s going to devote her life to social reform. But she’s far from running around wearing trousers and engaging in the kind of behaviour that would get her banned from polite society. Hero dresses in fashionable dresses that are suitable to her station, she brings her maid with her whenever going out because that’s what propriety dictates, and enlists Sebastian’s help because she knows that there’s some places where a well-born lady simply cannot go. Thus proving that a lady doesn’t need to flout convention to be a complete badass. (I’m keeping a tally of how many men she’s killed so far. It’s six. Hero sometimes needs help and sometimes she’s terrified and sometimes she’s hoping someone will save her, but she’s never helpless.)

As for the main character himself, Sebastian St. Cyr, the author on her website describes him as a mix of Mr. Darcy and James Bond, which… yeah, sounds about right. He’s the third son of an Earl and his father didn’t like him very much, but when he was a child his brothers died and so he’s now the Viscount Devlin and his father’s heir. (Devlin, not Devil, damn you autocorrect.) In the first book he’s just returned from fighting in the army, and he’s a bitter and disillusioned man. You can probably read Why Kings Confess without having read any of the other books first, because the recurring characters are given a short introduction and each book is a self-contained story with no cliffhanger, but you’d miss out on all the character development and revelations about Sebastian’s family history. He does start off drinking too much to forget about the war and fighting duels because he doesn’t care about his life, but two years later he’s quite happily married and frets about going out of town for a day because his wife is nine months pregnant.

To me, the personal lives of Sebastian and his family and friends are the strong suit of this book. The mystery of Damion Pelletan’s murder is well built and there are several plot twists that kept me guessing until the end. I did guess a few things, but the murderer turned out to be someone I had completely discarded as a suspect. However my personal preference is for detective novels à la Agatha Christie, while this is more of a thriller. Sebastian’s favourite method of investigation is confronting suspects and badgering them until they tell him some important plot point, which he uses to track down another suspect and confront them until they tell him something else that he didn’t already know. Rinse and repeat until you figure out who the murderer is.

So, on the strength of the mystery plot alone, I wouldn’t recommend this book. But as a part of a long-running series with solid storylines and complex, engaging characters? Definitely. If you like regency mysteries, dashing gentlemen and kickass ladies, you should check out the first book in the series, What Angels Fear, which has just been republished with a shiny new cover.

[Ren] Shades of Milk and Honey (Glamourist Histories #1) by Mary Robinette Kowal

Title: Shades of Milk and Honey (Glamourist Histories #1)
Author: Mary Robinette Kowal
Published: August 3rd, 2010
Rating: 

Jane Austen! With magic! I need to get better at writing summaries.

Jane Ellsworth lives in a world that’s pretty much like Regency England, with one big difference: glamour, the ability to use magic to manipulate the light and create fantastical illusions. Jane is a very skilled glamourist, but aside from that she’s plain and has no other accomplishments that could net her a husband, so at the ripe old age of 28 she’s resigned herself to a life of spinsterhood. (The careful reader, who has already noticed that this book is marked as romance, is free to laugh now.)

But this is not your cut-and-paste Regency romance, where the heroine spends most of the book swooning over the designated love interest. In fact I didn’t catch on who was the designated love interest until later in the book: there are a couple different eligible young men and for a while it felt like Jane could have ended up with either of them. It wasn’t a love triangle in the usual sense, more like the realistic situation of a girl meeting two guys and trying to figure out which one she likes.

The romance is just one part of the book, too, Jane’s family and her study of glamour also play a very important role. Overall this was a great first book in a series.

…However. Unfortunately I don’t think the next two books lived up to Shades of Milk and Honey. They rely too much on the “novelty” of glamour (which after three books isn’t much of a novelty at all) and the characters don’t develop much, becoming rather flat. They’re still enjoyable reads, but not quite as good. I’m not going to review them separately (I read them back to back and some of the details are muddied in my mind) but here they are. The fourth book Valour and Vanity is coming out in April.

Title: Glamour in Glass (Glamourist Histories #2)
Author: Mary Robinette Kowal
Published: April 10th, 2011
Rating: 

Jane and her husband, whose name is kind of spoilerific if you haven’t read the first book, go to Belgium for their honeymoon. However, this being a Regency novel, there is political turmoil because of Napoleon. The back cover does a wonderful job of spoiling a plot point that happens towards the end of the book so let’s just say that the unstable political situation doesn’t make for a restful holiday — though it does make for a decent plot, otherwise it would have been rather dull.

Title: Without a Summer (Glamourist Histories #3)
Author: Mary Robinette Kowal
Published: April 2nd, 2013
Rating: 

Jane and her husband, who remains unnamed in this review even though you’ll probably realize who he is as soon as he shows up in the first book, and then you’ll think me stupid for not having figured it out… Wait, who even is the guy on the cover? Are the covers also getting progressively worse? Anyway, more stuff about glamour happens. Jane’s sister Melody appears quite a lot; in the first book she was quite flat but in this book she’s shown to be a much better person than I (or Jane) gave her credit for, so yay for sisters in books.