And Dangerous to Know by Darcie Wilde aka Sarah Zettel

Rating: WARTY!

Darcie, seriously? For an English mystery inspired by Jane Austen? "When a lady requests her help in recovering a packet of stolen letters, sleuth...." Stop right there. That's me out. "Rosalind Thorne finds herself in a complicated plot involving Lord Byron, scandal - and murder." Of course she does. Why not bring in real historical people and make 'em dance to your tune? Admittedly Byron deserves everything he gets, but usually these things are done so badly. The whole idea of this turns me off, especially the main character's name.

Dangerous Deceptions by Sarah Zettel

Title: Dangerous Deceptions
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.

Palace of Spies by Sarah Zettel

Title: Palace of Spies
Author: Sarah Zettel
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Rating: WORTHY!

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 of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

Despite the unfortunate initials of this novel's title (PoS!), I loved the title page which said,

Being a true, accurate, and complete account of the scandalous and wholly remarkable adventures of Margaret Preston Fitzroy, counterfeit lady, accused thief, and confidential agent at the court of His Majesty King George 1.

My dearest hope going in was that this novel would live up to that adorable billing in every way (even though the accused thief bit isn't true!).

I'm not a fan of historical romance, which is why I found myself liking this novel. The story is a real pleasure to read. It's not only believable, but gripping, interesting, with a sharp tang of sly humor running through it, and it drew me right in. It moves very quickly, and nothing is wasted. Just when I thought a trope romance guy was going to enter the fray and drag things down into the mud, he was dispatched with admirable expediency: indeed his very fate was essential to the tale to move it along.

I had only one mild issue with it in the first one hundred pages, but with what novel are there no issues? The issue was merely the use of American spellings and idiom, and even having said that, I'm forced to wonder, with regard to idiom, whether modern American English might possess of itself more authenticity than modern English English for a tale such as this, set as it is three hundred years ago. I'll leave that to the experts to resolve because it certainly isn't worth agonizing over in a novel which is as well written as this one has proven itself to be.

Our doubty protagonist, Margaret Fitzroy ("Peggy"), born in the year 1700, is a sixteen-year-old when we meet her, a spirited woman whose father left her family half her lifetime ago, which betrayal subsequently resulted in the deterioration of her mother to the point of death (so we're told - I have some doubts, I confess!). I strongly suspect that we will revisit this incident at a later point in Peggy's history. In the meantime, she was taken in by an uncle who was resentful of it to say the least, and Peggy found herself on easy street, becoming spoiled and not entirely as appreciative of what she had as perhaps she ought to have been.

She grew to be best friends with her cousin Olivia, both girls being well-educated and having rather wild and dramatic imaginations; then it all came crashing down when Peggy was informed that she had been betrothed to Sebastien. This was immediately post-ceded by "the incident" which was beautifully written. Suddenly, Peggy finds her life in ruins. She is quite literally on the street. Fortunately for her circumstances, an unusual encounter with a rather mysterious gentleman at a ball she had attended the night before has provided the only option which remains to her. She avails herself of this opportunity, although she does not see it so at the time, and this is how she becomes a spy in the court of King George 1st under a false name, posing as the Lady Francesca.

What more do you need for me to tell you in order for you to want to go get this novel and start reading immediately?! I blew through the first one hundred pages, expending zero effort in the doing, and fully expected to see off the remaining 262 without having to get up out of my seat.

So Peggy is trained and goes to court where interesting discoveries galore lie in wait for her which I will not share, although I long to! Another rather tropish guy puts in an appearance, but until I finished the novel I chose to reserving judgment upon him. In terms of court life, we're spared too many tedious details. The only thing I found curious there (curious in a bad way) was the mention of Frideric Handel. Given the German origin of the Princess (Caroline) whom Peggy meets, why is he not referred to as Georg Friedrich Händel? Who knows?! Actually there is one other major curiosity: How does Peggy get away with posing as a completely different person? That, I felt was stretching things a bit far, so you have to agree to let that slip by if you want to really enjoy this!

Having just completed the less-than-stellar The Friday Society, I have to say that Zettel walks all over Adrienne Cress in her ability to convey a sense of period, but without using a lot of antiquated or stilted language to do it. If you want to write an historical novel, yet make it truly accessible to today's young audience, take some pages out of Zettel's novel. No, don't do that, she'll sue you for plagiarism. Instead, learn from her, and try to emulate her example with your own original material!

My first real disappointment in this novel came in chapter twelve where we're treated to a paragraph-long description of Peggy's attire. I don’t care what she's wearing unless it has some direct relevance to the plot! I'm not one who is impressed by an author who is proudly dedicated to crowing about how much period research she did. I don’t know this period, so Zettel could slip things by me which I would not catch. Unless she tossed in something really anachronistic, I woudn't notice, and there's no reason why I should. I don’t care. I'm about character and plot, not about frills. Two sentences, if you really insist, to set her attire in place and then let’s go! Please!

But while I'm on this topic, I have a question: why would a woman who lives in that era, who has been raised in that era knowing no other era, make so many remarks about her attire, and in particular, her stays? I don't buy that approach at all. Admittedly I have a really serious problem with first person PoV novels, but that's a whole other essay! Peggy's period in history may well be something new to us as twenty-first century readers of this fiction, but it was nothing to her. She was habituated to it and had no reason to constantly remark upon the peccadilloes of it. The only reason she would do so is because the author wanted to show off, and that turns me off. I found it to be nothing other than a frequent reminder that I was reading historical fiction, which in turn made it more difficult for me to become engaged by the story. Please, if you're going to write historical fiction, stay with the fiction and avoid the friction! This applies especially if you're going to write it from a contemporary perspective, and even more especially if this is a first-person perspective. Write it realistically and not as though our narrator is a twenty-first century visitor to that era! It doesn't work!

I'm not convinced that a woman living in Peggy's era would have thoughts which included phrases along the lines of 'dropped dead', but that's the kind of thing I'm personally willing to let go right on by if it's not combined with other problems in the same small section of the novel! I was rather disappointed, given Peggy's confusion during her Molly's monologue, that she did not think to ask Abbot (now posing as another maid) to explain a few things about Lady Francesca's personal history. Indeed, why were these things not shared with Peggy beforehand? Things like this are far more likely to trip her up than the other material she was taught. Fortunately, Molly seems like she's going to be an ally. This is why Peggy ought to confide in her that she's not exactly compos mentis and needs a little help, which should not come in the form of a poker she picked up as a defensive weapon in the hallway! Why would there be a poker in the hallway? There are no fireplaces in the hallway! Remember, the only water in the forest is the river, hence the River Song….

My second real disappointment also arrived with chapter twelve - that of another trope male romantic figure, Matthew Reade (yes with an 'e'!) who at first glace appeared to be some sort of an artist, but as I mentioned, I was willing to let this go and see how it played out. I was hoping that Zettel would really pull out some magic from that point onwards, otherwise I should perforce be required to dispossess this goodly novel of my favor.

Fortunately for my budding relationship with Zettel, she did pull out some magic. Matthew turned out to be no trope at all, and the story really took off. I thoroughly enjoyed this and was thrilled by how Zettel handled the romance which wasn't really any kind of romance - not yet - which was why I enjoyed it so much. I approve of Matthew. I was happy to read the novel to the end and sad that it ended, but this is to be the start of a series, and I'm definitely on board with it. Notwithstanding my criticisms above, I recommend this novel. The story was engrossing, the characters charming, and the villains realistic. Be prepared for plot twists and double-twists, for fun and durring-do (and don't), but most of all, just sit back and enjoy Peggy - an up-and-coming main character with pluck, loyalty, bravery, and a healthy dose of humor. Can't go wrong. This is a worthy novel!