Gentleman Jim

 

Gentleman Jim

By Mimi Matthews

She couldn't forget...

Wealthy squire's daughter Margaret Honeywell was always meant to marry her neighbor, Frederick Burton-Smythe, but it's bastard-born Nicholas Seaton who has her heart. Raised alongside her on her father's estate, Nicholas is the rumored son of notorious highwayman Gentleman Jim. When Fred frames him for theft, Nicholas escapes into the night, vowing to find his legendary sire. But Nicholas never returns. A decade later, he's long been presumed dead.

He wouldn't forgive...

After years spent on the continent, John Beresford, Viscount St. Clare has finally come home to England. Tall, blond, and dangerous, he's on a mission to restore his family's honor. If he can mete out a bit of revenge along the way, so much the better. But he hasn't reckoned for Maggie Honeywell. She's bold and beautiful—and entirely convinced he's someone else.

As danger closes in, St. Clare is torn between love and vengeance. Will he sacrifice one to gain the other? Or with a little luck—and a lot of daring—will he find a way to have them both?

Eh, this one was emphatically fine, but not my favorite of Matthews' stuff. Which is weird, since it doesn't have the Victorian overtones of her other (Victorian) novels, which are the parts I tend to like the least, but here the relationship between the main characters had basically already happened and developed off-screen, and this was just a look at them overcoming exterior obstacles, which isn't as much of my jam.  I also really didn't like Margaret's interactions with Fred, since her plan was basically appeasement, which was both doomed to failure, and unpleasant to read. 

I don't think it's a HUGE spoiler to say that St. Clare the aristocrat and Nicholas, Margaret's first love, are in fact the same person, just, you know, doing a bad job of moving on past his early childhood traumas.  Matthews notes that this was inspired quite a bit by Count of Monte Cristo, which I can see.  Certainly the innocent who is wrongfully accused and forced to leave his beloved, returns years later, wealthy, powerful, and with some vengeance in mind, is pretty familiar.  Maybe too familiar? Part of my beef with the book is that a lot of the resolutions to the plot points (were his parents actually married???) were telegraphed so clearly that I found myself almost skimming the conflict sections since they held no mystery or tension for me.  What I was super invested in was Margaret's friend Jane's crush on Mattingly, which involved like, six paragraphs of the book, but took on outsize importance for me.  I hope they get their own story next!

It also felt weirdly out of period at points.  Maybe I've just been conditioned to the Jane Austen regency era, but all the discussion of Margaret as a pistol-wielding, horse-riding daredevil, not to mention the highwaymen and mustache-twirling villains felt like this was supposed to be set in a completely different era.  For me, it kind of evoked Tom Hawke/The Link Boys, by Constance Fecher, which is set in the early 1600s, but even a more Dickensian 1800s would fit, or Sid Fleischman, although I have no idea when those were supposed to be set.  By the way, Tom Hawke is awesome and it should come back into print!  My copy is literally bound together with scotch tape.    

Ten Second Reviews

Romancing the Duke

By Tessa Dare

As the daughter of a famed author, Isolde Ophelia Goodnight grew up on tales of brave knights and fair maidens. She never doubted romance would be in her future, too. The storybooks offered endless possibilities.

And as she grew older, Izzy crossed them off. One by one by one.

• Ugly duckling turned swan?
• Abducted by handsome highwayman?
• Rescued from drudgery by charming prince?

No, no, and . . . Heh.

Now Izzy's given up yearning for romance. She'll settle for a roof over her head. What fairy tales are left over for an impoverished twenty-six year-old woman who's never even been kissed?

This one.

 

This one grew on me, as I don't really like "zany" romances, and this one started out that way, with a bedraggled destitute lady camping out at an abandoned castle with a blind duke with some type of wolf -dog mix and a ferret.  Oh, yes, very likely (don't you know that realism is required in all romance novels?).  I was getting close to DNFing, but since I'd actually used up a legitimate hold for it, I figured I should at least finish, and it got better as it went on.  Companions showed up, things settled down some, though the tone was still very much "Disney-fied historical romance", but by the end of it, I wasn't mad.  Was it really my jam? Absolutely not, I will not be re-reading it.  But it did feel "mostly harmless".   Basically, a bunch of kooky people find each other, decide that friendship is more important than proving sanity, catch a lucky break because one of the sanity-hearing officers likes some books the woman's father published, and they all live happily ever after. 

 

 

 

The Further Observations of Lady Whistledown

By Suzanne Enoch, Karen Hawkins, Mia Ryan, and Julia Quinn

 

Lady Whistledown Tells All!

When the scandalous actions of his beautiful fiancée are recorded in Lady Whistledown's column, a concerned groom-to-be rushes back to London to win his lady's heart once and forever, in Suzanne Enoch's enchanting romantic gem.

Karen Hawkins captivates with an enduring story of a handsome rogue whose lifelong friendship — and his heart — are tested when the lovely lady in question sets her cap for someone else.

A dazzling and delightful tale by Mia Ryan has a young woman cast out of her home by an insufferable yet charming marquis — who intends to take possession not only of the house ... but its former occupant as well!

Society is abuzz when the Season's most promising debutante is jilted by her intended — only to be swept away by the deceitful rogue's dashing older brother — in New York Times bestseller Julia Quinn's witty, charming, and heartfelt tale.

 

Did I check this out because Bridgerton is all the rage, and The Viscount Who Loved Me is totally unavailable at the library? Yes, there are 14 people for each of the 21 copies my library has, meaning that if I checked it out, I could expect it in mmm, perhaps seven months, and even that is a workaround, because they aren't stocking the second book solo, it's only available in a set of the first three in the series.  I like Bridgerton okay, certainly not as much as some people (and not as much as my mother, who appears to be using it as a method of mood-stabilizers during COVID) but the second's plotline was the only one that appealed to me to read.  Anyway, so this was a distant second choice!

Although all the stories are interlinked (and take place at the same activities, set in London from about January 26th to February 15th, 1814, serendipitously), with the different authors, there's some definite changes in quality from story to story.  For example, Quinn's is obviously the best (due to both her authorly experience and it being her characters, so I would have assumed it), then Enoch, Hawkins, and finally Ryan is a -very- distant fourth.  I think I skipped most of that one, it was so scattershot and nonsensical.  Some of them would have been more satisfying as stand-alone novels - I think Quinn's in particular could have withstood longer treatment, and Hawkins had a great premise, but the character seemed to realize they loved each other in a very all-of-a-sudden! way that felt rushed and necessary for Moving the Story Along reasons than a natural pace.  And although it felt clever at first, by the fourth time we've revisited the same two "group" scenes from various characters' perspectives - one at the theater and one with several characters falling over in a snowbank while ice-skating, it mostly felt tedious.  Overall, not a terrible waste of an afternoon, but not really all that exciting either.  

What I really need is a good author who is NOT ON HOLD FOR SEVEN MONTHS.  Unfortunately, I found like, two that I like consistently, and I read all theirs and now it's even harder to get books because of the Bridgerton phenomenon, so I'm reduced to trawling recommendation lists and reading the zany ones or my second choices. God forbid I actually have to buy my romance novels as opposed to getting them free a the library or second hand at a used booksale behind my mother's back and then smuggled home illicitly. 

Ten Second Reviews

Note that Seven Days of Us and Monstrous Beauty were read in 2019, while Gilded Web was in 2021.

Seven Days of Us

By Francesca Hornak

 

Family gathers together to quarantine for the holidays, with unexpected secrets coming to light.

This was a different kind of predictable - in fact the least predictable thing about it is how much I was won over by the end.  In the beginning, everyone is kind of awful: lies abound, just plain unhappiness, and Jesse planning to just crash into his biological father's life like a bomb was driving me crazy. How could everyone be encouraging this? It's not hard! If your purported father does not respond to your email, HE DOESN'T WANT TO SEE YOU.  I mean, that's pretty much true of everybody, don't just invite yourself places.   But somehow all the contrived craziness cancels itself out and the end is a sweet family holiday story: Jesse's accepted, Emma's cancer is less scary, Andrew's leaving his soul-sucking job, Olivia has a baby (and a dead boyfriend, man, THAT I didn't expect (except I kinda did, because I kept checking to see how long it would go for and saw spoilers, whoops)) and the youngest girl's engagement is over, conveniently bothering her for approximately one and one-half days, just long enough to stir up drama between the family, but not long enough that we start to feel like the relationship was anything but a plot digression.

Monstrous Beauty
By Elizabeth Fama

Mermaid falls in love with land dweller, setting off a chain of events and ghostly curses down the generations. 

This one was....fine.  A young woman in New England finds a ghost (without realizing it) and is drawn to him, only to have to figure out her family's connection with a three/four person murder a couple hundred years ago and - wait, let me try to work this out (with spoilers!).  So the mermaid likes this guy and accidentally drowns him, so the next guy she likes she realizes she needs like human lungs for, so after she's caught and raped by Olaf (the mermaid gets a really shitty deal in this whole thing) she takes his lungs, but then she's pregnant so she gives the baby up and it's adopted by Olaf's terrible wife? Who also accuses her of killing Olaf? (somehow Olaf and his awful wife are the only people smart enough to realize she's a mermaid) and then lures her to the church for murder, except that the mermaid kills Olaf's wife (and also the minister and the little girl who was watching the mermaid's adopted baby also die, because why not) and then somehow the mermaid's husband gives up his life for hers, but she doesn't want him to die so the mermaid takes the baby's soul and gives it to... him?  This part is the most confusing: did her husband die? Did she die? Apparently the husband sticks around as a ghost, and she just...melts? Unclear. And then everytime the baby (or her daughters) has a baby, the mother dies because there is too much soul for the world? Also unclear.  

 

Gilded Web

By Mary Balogh 

Woman in regency England is mistakenly kidnapped and has to marry or face scandal.

This was fine, I guess, ugh.  Mary Balogh is generally alright, but I realized partly through this one that I'd read the third book of this series earlier in 2020 and hated it (mostly because of how awful the hero was - he is literally super mean to his wife for the entire book except at the very end, when he finds out she's pregnant.  Yeah, that's a keeper).  This started out VERY over the top (fake kidnapping! mistaken identity! shenanigans!) but the hero and heroine turned out to be fairly buttoned up and quiet people, so it wasn't too crazy.  I didn't really feel the need for the different viewpoints - I think we get through three or four of the side characters, in addition to the mains, and none of them were that compelling - and it started dragging after the halfway mark.  Plus, the struggle is resolved by the heroine deciding that as long as the hero was willing to call off the engagement, then that means she has enough autonomy to stay in the marriage.  But all of her points are still valid! They're just impossible to solve in regency England under the conditions she was in. Well, not a blazing start to the new year, but we gotta start somewhere!

Ten Second Reviews

The Devil in Music

By Kate Ross

Alas, we've come to the end of our series, and I am actually very disappointed that there won't be any more - this was a pleasant delight of a set.  As before, coincidences and lucky chances abound without alluding to them, and it's a very chunky book, but you just don't seem to mind any of that.  I may at some point get the whole set to sit down and enjoy.  I really couldn't say that these are the best books in the world, but I just really had a good time with them, and in the end, isn't that what matters?  Anyway, Julian Kestrel solves another (couple) murders, this time whilst on Lake Como, which did nothing to make me satisfied with my own little plot of land.  Truly the rich are to be envied.

My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

Edited by Stephanie Perkins

This was more of a hit or miss for me (which most anthologies are, despite my glowing review of How Long Til Black Future Month? and the, uh, next anthology, below).  It's definitely a YA & love/romance-y one, particularly at the start, which I guess I... wasn't expecting?  Now that I think about it, I think I just picked this one up in the library and didn't really look at reviews or anything, so... surprise! Here's my one sentence reviews:

• Midnights, by Rainbow Rowell: boring, nineteen year olds like each other after several years of being friends.  
• The Lady and the Fox, by Kelly Link: girl falls in love with weird guy she only sees at Christmas if it's snowing.  He's from like, three hundred years ago, so who knows how that culture shock is going to go but let's pretend they have a future together.
• Angels in the Snow, by Matt de la Pena: hispanic guy falls for white girl while he's housesitting at some rich person's place - not bad, but after the previous two, needed something stronger than this.
• Polaris is Where You'll Find Me, by Jenny Han: Um, what the heck did I just read? Young human girl raised up by Santa falls for an elf, but also has a thing where she tells lies about meeting a Scandinavian boy and also really wants to leave the North Pole. This feels like it ends on a cliffhanger, but it's crazy enough that I was starting to get into it.
• It's a Yuletide Miracle, Charlie Brown: Ah, here we run into our series second theme: depressed people.  It kinda came up with Angels in the Snow, and in this one, a young christmas tree salesman is picked up by, and rearranges the furniture for, a young lady whose father left her and her mother because they were his bigamist family.  Fun at the outset but a little too saccharine to finish.
• Your Temporary Santa, by David Levithan: another one about a depressed family, although I wasn't quite clear on what fatherly disaster had befallen this one - another abandonment I guess.  This was fine, less romance because the couple was already together, so it was just someone doing something nice, which is more of what I was looking for in this set.
• Krampuslauf, by Holly Black: trailer park girl invites a demon back to a party, and he turns a cheating boyfriend into a donkey.  Good times! Two thumbs up.
• What the Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth? by Gayle Forman: lonely city girl gets picked up by black guy on her small town midwest college campus.  I think I gave this one more of a pass because the stories before were a bit better/different.  If this had been placed third or fourth in the book, whoa.
• Beer Buckets and Baby Jesus, by Myra McEntire: Juvenile delinquent and good girl fall for each other during mixed up Christmas Pageant process.  At least this was a little bit funnier than the other boy-meets-girl stories, but also more of the same.
• Welcome to Christmas, CA, by Kiersten White: young teen hates everyone in her small town, until she meets the new diner cook who knows what food everyone needs. I definitely thought that the cook was going to turn out to be like, an elf, or an angel, or some other supernatural being, but he was just another juvenile delinquent, but this one was my favorite by far, especially when she learns that her mother and de facto step-father have actually been scrimping and saving for her and her college fund (so obvious, but it's CHRISTMAS).  Sniff.
•  Star of Bethlehem, by Ally Carter: Young singing sensation switches places with Icelandic girl and flies to Oklahoma where she feels okay about singing Christmas Carols again. This one felt way too long, and I can't help but HATE the very end, where the local judge is telling people that apparently it would be pretty easy to undo the guardianship her manager has over her.  In favor of these people she met a week ago, I guess.  Mmmmhmmm, yeah. 
• The Girl Who Woke the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor: The Strange the Dreamer series has been on my list forever (I think I was waiting to see if more books in the series were coming out???) and this gave me the push to get it. I didn't want to read too closely in case there were spoilers for the book series, but the beginning is really interesting and well written, and it inspired me to check more books by her out, so what else do you want?

Nine Witch Tales

By Abby Kedabra

Man, I LOVED this book when I was growing up, some twenty-five years ago, so I bought an old copy online, and it does NOT disappoint, this book is wild. I really mostly remembered the first story, where the twelve horned witches come in to do some sewing and then send this woman on errands like, "fill up a bucket using this sieve".  But all of them are fun, and short enough you don't get tired of them: haha, the one about Kowashi's mother, who developed an appetite for eating fish, bones and all, and he whacks her on the head and realizes she's a witch demon cat, and then! Casually, at the very end it goes: "Not long after this, Kowashi discovered that the wicked cat had killed his real mother and buried her in the garden." And then it just ends. FIN.  MAJESTIC.  I LOVE IT. And the curious woman who uses the magical ointment and is dragged all over and then wakes up in a barn and gets fired because her employer thinks she's drunk, lol. There's comeuppances and escapes, and each story is a delightfully spooky and scary-but-not-too-scary tale.

 

Ten Second Reviews

Cut to the Quick

By Kate Ross

Julian Kestrel is the walking definition of a Regency-era dandy. He cares about little beyond the perfection of his tailoring, he lives for the bon mot, and his life has the specific gravity and the fleeting charm of a soap-bubble. At least that's what he'd like you to think. In fact, it rather suits Kestrel to be perpetually underestimated, particularly when as in this instance his weekend at a glamorous country estate is spoiled by a dead girl's body being found in his bed.

I did like this one - it was a nice break from modern day thrillers, which can be so overwrought.  This one is much more of a classic mystery, with interrogations and secrets discovered, although there is still the confrontation of the murderer, here, it's with the guise of an actual magistrate's duty.  It feels like a pretty chunky book - there's a lot to the back story, which comes out in pieces (and more than a few coincidences, but they aren't the most egregious), so it took me a while to get through it.  Overall, I enjoyed the Regency setting, and the characters, enough to look into the sequel.  Onward and upward!

Comics for a Strange World: A Book of Poorly Drawn Lines

By Reza Farazmand

 

This follow up in the Poorly Drawn Lines series was not nearly as good as the first, for some reason.  Possibly because it felt like it focused more on robots and technology than absurdist humor.  So-so, but I would get the first book and skip this one.

A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie

By Kathryn Harkup

 

This is an alphabetically arranged examination of the poisons used in Agatha Christie's books (funny: you'd never know it from the title).  I really liked this one - first of all, I never realized that Christie was a chemist, and that she kept her poison use really factual and close to reality.  Maybe this is a little embarrassing, but I barely noticed the actual murder weapon when I was reading  - it almost felt superfluous sometimes, since motive seemed so much more important (and Christie always made sure multiple suspects would have been capable of the means).  Harkup goes into detail not only in how Christie used the poison in a particular book/story, but also into the poison itself, famous real life murders, effects on the body, etc.  I have just one complaint, which is that Harkup gets into the chemical properties of the poisons more than is really necessary for most laypeople (and geez, I hope all of her readers are laypeople and not budding young poisoners looking for tips) so I tended to skim the passages about enzymes and receptors and molecules.  But the rest is highly enjoyable, although I would recommend against reading it while sitting with a dying relative receiving morphine, because it will give you bad dreams.

Ten Second Reviws

Edenbrooke

By Julianne Donaldson

Marianne goes to spend some time in the country, visiting friends that her more beautiful and talented twin sister has made, battling highwaymen, fortune hunters, catty women and flirty men. For as silly as some (most?) of Edenbrooke is, I have to confess that when Marianne overheard Philip "complaining" about her and making it sound like he hated her guts (even though we all knew it was actually the complete opposite) something deep in the reptilian, instinctual part of my brain went "Mmm, good".  The heart wants what it wants.  And my heart wants contrived situations in which two people in love think that the other person hates them.  Angst, what a delight! Anyway, 'tis a very silly, slight book, but man, sometimes that's kind of what you need. 

Darkdawn

By Jay Kristoff

For some reason all my formatting is fucking up today (like just moving things on its own) so we'll see how long I can stand it.  Long story short: if you've read this far, you may as well read Darkdawn.  It's good enough.  I read (and liked) the first one, but it definitely didn't seem like we were going to be getting into a whole thing about the Moon in book one.  Mostly it seemed like a pretty straight-forward revenge tale.  Not that there's anything wrong with the Moon, it just seems like we took a hard left somewhere.  Anyway, this book is mostly a road trip, and there is a lot (far too much for my taste) of bantering/griping/star-crossed romance.  Plus, people die like every few chapters, which takes some of the emotion out of all the deaths.  And I don't think that's intentional. Anyway, the bad guy gets super powerful on dark magic but is defeated anyway, Mia's little brother decides he can love this mysterious, murderous sister he doesn't remember who drags him all over creation, narrowly escaping death multiple times and who insists on calling him a different name and telling him he's adopted,  somehow the person that Mia loves comes back from  the dead (no, the other one) to live happily ever after, and the moon is back in the sky and only one sun, so even though like 90% of the people who met/helped Mia along the way are dead, yay? Boo on the changed solar system though, I thought three suns was cool.

Count of Monte Cristo

The Count of Monte Cristo

By Alexandre Dumas

Set against the turbulent years of the Napoleonic era, Alexandre Dumas's thrilling adventure story is one of the most widely read romantic novels of all time. In it the dashing young hero, Edmond Dantès, is betrayed by his enemies and thrown into a secret dungeon in the Chateau d'If — doomed to spend his life in a dank prison cell. The story of his long, intolerable years in captivity, his miraculous escape, and his carefully wrought revenge creates a dramatic tale of mystery and intrigue and paints a vision of France — a dazzling, dueling, exuberant France — that has become immortal.

This was the only book on the list that I've read before, because the prompt explicitly required it.  Although I have other, shorter, favorite books, I'd happened to have recently re-read those when the list came out, and I knew I'd have two weeks traveling that I could spend on a nice thick doorstopper.  I've read Count a few times already, and I was really looking forward to re-reading it.  Well, this time, I got five chapters in and had to put it away.  Even though I knew what was coming, and it wasn't a surprise in any way, for some reason the destruction of all of Edmond's hopes on his wedding day just really upset me.  I had to switch to Sherlock Holmes for a few days before I had the strength to continue.

I know this sounds incredibly snotty, but I do get new things out of it every time I re-read it.  Partly because it's so fucking long, there's probably like whole pages I've skipped and never noticed.  Last time I remember thinking that we spent a lot of time going over Benedetto's storyline, which I barely noticed this time around.  This reading had me way focused on the Count's bizarre belief that God was guiding him (because God loves REVENGE too? Actually it probably does) and this whole thing he had about people "deserving" happiness, depending on whether they had suffered a lot.  Also, my perennial gripe about how long we spend on Albert and Franz and the Rome saga, which I ALWAYS find boring and out of place, as a very long meander through a (frankly uninteresting) side character's perspective.  Come on, we have REVENGE waiting!

I also ended up re-watching the 2002 movie version, which does a yeoman's job compressing a thousand page book into a comprehensible two and a half hour movie, and ends up squashing the Haydee, Mercedes, and Albert stories, so Haydee disappears, Albert becomes the Count's biological son and Mercedes reunites with the Count, with all three sailing off into the sunset.  A dramatic departure, but on the extras the director is like, "I stand by that.  It's the only way the story even makes sense" and I kind of get where he's coming from.  As nice as it is to see the wicked punished, and as necessary as it may be for the Count to realize that the innocent by proximity, have also been punished in his mad schemes, it feels oddly unsatisfying for Mercedes (by all accounts a real stand up woman) to end her days poor and living off whatever money her son makes as a soldier (and what kind of future would the son of a now infamous traitor have in the army anyway?).  And the last scene we have with Mercedes we leave on a weird, uncertain note, basically - she won't accept help, so who knows how she'll live!

Maybe I'm softening in my old age.  Although maybe not, because I definitely forgot how Danglars' story ended and when I got to it, I was like, "This is it?! He keeps $50,000 livres and goes on his merry way?? This is bull#$%!" For real though, what the fuck.  Danglars basically engineered the whole damn thing, and he has no conscience, so appealing to one is a wasted effort.  I think the Count just ran out of steam there.  To be fair, Villefort's madness would leave a real bad taste in your mouth, but again, nothing that happened to these people was anything other than the result of their own evils, all brought home to roost. Yes, they could have lived undamaged lives if not for the Count, but simply because you are not caught being bad does not make you a good person.

 I also was paying much closer attention to the lesbian storyline this time around because last time I was kind of like, "Huh, that's kind of gay" and this time, I was like, "I'm pretty sure Dumas knew what the fuck he was doing with those two women."  If not, then, I mean, he's really good at writing lesbians accidentally.  

I read this while sailing around Greenland, which was great, because I had both plenty of time, and also (as a book I'd previously read) not so much invested in it that I wasn't able to do other things on the ship.  Honestly, I said I always get new things out of it each time I read it, but I keep re-reading it because I get the same things out of it too: entertainment, drama, REVENGE, guilt, sorrow, love, and epic-ness.  Whatever else Dumas may have been, he was a hell of a story-teller. 


07: A Re-read Of A Favorite Book

Bewitching Season

Bewitching Season, by Marissa Doyle

In 1837 London, young daughters of viscounts pined for handsome, titled husbands, not careers. And certainly not careers in magic. Shy, studious Persephone Leland would far rather devote herself to her secret magic studies than enter society and look for a suitable husband. But just as the inevitable season is about to begin, Persy and her twin sister discover that their governess in magic has been kidnapped as part of a plot to gain control of Princess Victoria. Racing through Mayfair ballrooms and royal palaces, the sisters overcome bad millinery, shady royal spinsters, and a mysterious Irish wizard. And along the way, Persy learns that husband hunting isn't such an odious task after all, if you have the right quarry.

This was one of those books to which I had had been looking forward for quite some time. I had to wait all summer before it came to my turn in the queue, and I could pick it up and read it. So you might imagine my disappointment when I discovered that it wasn't quite all that. I'm a big fan of both regency teen novels and magic novels, and any combination thereof (see further Sorcery and Cecelia, or the Enchanted Chocolate Pot; also Amaranth Enchantment). Perhaps it's because I've read too many of these, but Bewitching Season did not strike a chord for me. It starts off with an excellent premise - two young magical twin sisters, about to embark on their Introduction to Society, have to navigate young men as well as nefarious wizards - but about a third or halfway in, I just found myself wanting to shake the main character, Persy. And that didn't go away.

Persy is ostensibly the wallflower and the less attractive of the two sisters because she's less vivacious (we know this because she mopes about it for the first three chapters). An old childhood acquaintence, all grown up and handsome, re-enters their drawing room, and clearly has eyes for her, and Persy for him, and yet we must suffer through the entire course of the book as Persy goes back and forth on he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not, managing to hit every cliche on her path to true love. Thinking that you don't deserve his love because you are the "plain" sister? Check. Believing that because your sister is talking to him (because you are too shy to do so) means that they love each other, even though you are the only person they discuss? Check. Trying to cast a love spell on him even though he is clearly already head over heels? Check. Assuming that all his behaviour after said love spell is just an indication that your magical skillz are too strong for his willpower? Check. Rejecting him to save him from your own heedless attempts to ensnare him? Check. Not to mention, of course, the usual burning touch of hands, breathless glances, etc. etc.

I might have had more patience for this had Persy had other redeeming characteristics - but she kinda doesn't. Maybe it's a facet of being a teenage girl that I've forgotten about, but her behaviour is both rude and selfish, by refusing to confide in her sister because of her own jealous antics and "noble" mindedness. That's really what I disliked the most - her rejection of her sister means the book isn't really about friendship and sisterly relations and adventure, it's about this wah-wah narrator who puts her family and friends in danger by not telling them everything she knows, then goes about refusing to listen to advice and decides the best way to solve everything is to run away. Persy's misguided martyr mindset is inappropriate and irritating when everyone around her just wants her to succeed.

The "main" plot, that of the missing governess, is solved with, really, very little fanfare. Most of the book is taken up with fruitless searches for her, which (while realistic in their futility) are pointless, as in the end, the bad guys bring the girls to her anyhow. So that they could have done absolutely nothing and still found her. Gosh this review sounds bitter. Bewitching Season is really not that bad - inoffensive and harmless, at the very least. I just wish that the relationship Persy has with her little brother was actually between her and her sister. And that she wouldn't whine so much. To paraphrase Love, Actually: "Get a grip, people hate sissies. No one's ever going to like you if you cry all the time."