Author: Sarah Zettel
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!
This is the 372 page sequel to Palace of Spies which I reviewed favorably on my blog in mid-September last year, so I was thrilled to have the chance to review its successor as well. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed in this second novel in the series.
It was about a hundred pages too long for a start, and I don't even know where the title derived, because there really wasn't anything going on here that was dangerous or deceptive - at least not any more so than in the last volume. The last volume was equally mistitled, but it at least had the distinction of being a nearly unique title, unlike this one which is one amongst two dozen.
The protagonist is the brave, inventive and sometimes smart Margaret Preston Fitzroy, commonly referred to as Peggy. This is a first person PoV story - a person which I normally detest, but some writers can carry it and render it in a non-obnoxious form, and Sarah Zettel is, to my everlasting gratitude and adoration, one of these writers. She has a way of writing these stories that make them seem authentic and highly amusing. It felt like coming home when I read, "…my rooms had remained cold enough that my fingertips had achieved a truly arresting shade of blue." Bless you Sarah Zettel! The problem is that this tone disappeared rather quickly, and the novel became a bog-standard humdrum YA historical novel all too speedily. The highly amusing title page (see image on my blog) was soon lost under YA trope.
This is an ARC which I was reading, so sometimes there are issues, even though, in this electronic age, there is very little excuse for them. Spelling and grammar should never be a problem, and on this score, a publisher doth protest too much I find, but in this instance, things were fine until I reached the last complete paragraph in page two, where I discovered that words containing an 'e' followed by a 'k' as in "weeks" and "housekeeping" had the 'ek' replaced by a bizarre symbol that looked like a bow without a string (see image on my blog).
Similarly, any word which contained the combination "eh" had those two letters replaced with an apostrophe, so that on page 4, "behind" became "b'ind" and on page five, "horsehair" became "hors'air", and elsewhere "somehow" became "som'ow", and "behaving" became "b'aving". Weird! Hopefully this will be fixed before the final copy is released!
There were other issues which are arguably arguable! Such as, for example, would a woman of that era write "more important" (as we see on page three) or "more importantly"? I would guess the latter, but it’s just a guess. On page ten we read that an acquaintance of Peggy's "...sailed through life as well as doorways" which might have been more quickly grasped had it read, "...sailed through life as readily as she did through doorways". On page 91, we might ask the question of whether an English woman of the era would write "…out the window…" or "out of the window…." But each to his or her own. On page 127, she gets it right when she has Peggy use the phrase 'exclamation mark' rather than 'exclamation point'. And I seriously doubt anyone in 1716 would say "Half six" in relating that the time was 6:30. The Brits say it now, but not two hundred years ago.
At the very beginning of this novel, Peggy's life is at once complicated by the arrival of her would be rapist and betrothed suitor Sebastian Sandford bearing a gift of tea. He wishes to talk to her, but she will have none of him, yet he presents her with a rather expensive gift of tea (Twinings was established a decade before this novel begins!), and takes pains to let her know that he will be available when she realizes that she does indeed need to talk. Rapidly on his heels arrives her nasty uncle to demand that she marry Sandford, but she refuses, and her adorable cousin Olivia stands staunchly by her side, rebelling against her own father. It’s all go, innit?!
I found it rather inappropriate that a man should call upon a woman who is not a relative, and in her chambers, too. It seems scandalous to me; however, eventually Peggy does decide to meet with Sandford, but nothing occurs to trigger her change of mind, which I found rather false, given how much she detests him. In the end the choice is removed from her and she does meet.
The story went into the doldrums about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through and became quite boring, so I skimmed until we got to around page 315, where we find ourselves with a Casino Royale style showdown at the card table. Except that this is piquet, and there are only two players: Sebastian Sandford's brother Julius, who is playing against Peggy. Peggy has planned out this challenge and this game carefully, knowing that she can win if she doesn’t lose her concentration. How this works, especially given that Julius is cheating, is a mystery.
Sarah Zettel doesn’t write card games with anywhere near the skill that Ian Fleming did. And she evidently doesn’t know the rules of piquet, either. The piquet deck has only 32 cards. From a regular deck, this would mean the removal of all cards with a value of two through six, since only 7 and above, plus face cards and aces are used.
What this means is that the ending which Zettel wrote for the game made no sense. Peggy's win involved an errant two of clubs which could never have been in a piquet deck to begin with! Even had the card not been a two, but instead had been a non-face card other than an Ace within the confines of a piquet deck, this still offers no explanation for the game-changing conclusion which was drawn. Where's the basis for the assumption that the extra card is the one in his hand rather than the one on the floor? And why does Julius give up so quickly and equanimously? It made no sense given what we'd been told of him.
At one point - and without wanting to give too much away, there's an issue of what the Sandfords and her uncle are up to, and the answer lies in them having in their possession a massive amount of something. It's so obvious that it’s pathetic what all of that stuff was being stockpiled for, yet Peggy can’t figure it out. An army marches on its stomach dontcha know?!
In conclusion, I can't recommend this. It was unnecessarily long - far too long - and it was boring in far too many places. The tedious trope relationship between Matthew and Peggy is so awful that it makes for cringe-worthy reading. How this could have sped so fast in a downhill direction after the first volume went so well is a mystery, but I'm done with this series now.
