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Title: The Betrayal of the Blood Lily
Author: Lauren Willig
Genre: Historical spy romance
Thingummies: 3.5
Synopsis: A foolish indiscretion gets the head-strong Penelope married to a cad and packed off to India. Her foppish husband seems to have no idea how dangerous it can be to be a British army officer thrown into colonial intrigues, but Penelope quickly realizes how much trouble they are in. The local ruler is dangerously insane, the French are slinking around, and she would swear someone is trying to kill them. But most dangerous of all might be the charming officer assigned as their escort, who is reminding Penelope that not all men are as useless as her husband...
Thingummies: When we last left this series, Penelope was a minor character who gets married off to a total jerk while the protagonist's beau's best friend pines for her. Never quite sure why that last detail was provided--I had thought that he would follow Penelope and Freddy to India and win her back, but in Penelope's first chapter, we're introduced to the dashing Alex who will clearly be the love interest for this novel. Poor best friend never actually appears.
Meanwhile in modern London, Eloise (the historian researching Penelope's friends and their espionage-ish activities) has little new to add to her own kind of tepid romance and so unsuccessfully tries to pair off her boyfriend's sister. We see very little of Eloise, actually. The author's run out of ideas for her own insert, and so she's appeared less and less in each book. Which is best, really, since it's the historical spies and their affairs that are why I keep coming back.
I really liked this one, mostly because I really liked Penelope. It's of utmost importance to like the protagonists in a romance. In sf or fantasy or mysteries or thrillers, the plot is usually the most important part of the novel (with world-building being a close second for the first two). In literary fiction, it's style that's king. This doesn't mean that you don't want the characters to be engaging, but if the characters aren't quite right, the book can still come out ok. (Not perfect, but at least enjoyable.) In romance, the plot is secondary--the ultimate goal is the characters' emotional journey, and to enjoy the ride, you need to identify with the characters. Penelope is delightful--impulsive without being flighty, sarcastic, funny, smart, and brave. She makes some really bad decisions, but they're for understandable reasons.
I think a lot of the appeal here is that the obstacles to the happy ending really work. Too often, the protagonists fall in love for stupid reasons and resist their love for equally stupid reasons. Penelope has excellent motivations for bucking society's constraints and for distrusting men in general. Her own backstory explains well why she would marry Freddy, why she can't just leave him, and why she would find Alex appealing. Alex likewise has good reasons for falling for Pen. The pair also have good reasons for trying to resist their mutual attraction, and it's not just the fact that Penelope's already married. She very legitimately suspects that he might be the spy she's trying to root out. He rightfully believes from her initial behavior that she's a spoiled brat. When presented with suitable evidence to the contrary, each are capable of changing their minds. No idiot balls here.
There is some evidence that this book was written in haste. There are some plot threads that get dropped and never picked up, including a Chekov's gun that stays on the wall. There's also a couple places where it's clear that the author meant to write a scene and lost track of it. It's nothing that disrupts the flow of the story, just places where things get missed because of viewpoint changes. At one point, Penelope is refusing to speak to Alex. From his view, he's baffled. It's clearly set up so we can switch to Pen and have her angst--she has a good reason she's avoiding him. But the plot pulls us past this point of introspection while still in Alex's view. By the time we're back in Penelope's head, she's already resolved her internal conflict, which gets handwaved away in a sentence about how she had thought X but no longer could feel that way because of Y. It all makes sense, but it's pretty obvious that the author had meant to have a scene before Penelope changes her mind, and wrote herself into a bit of a corner and never went back and fixed it.
It's not so bothersome as to ruin the book, though. I do think Willig's gotten stronger in each installment. Spies! Angst! Understandable misunderstandings! Just keep on phasing out poor neurotic Eloise, thanks.
Author: Lauren Willig
Genre: Historical spy romance
Thingummies: 3.5
Synopsis: A foolish indiscretion gets the head-strong Penelope married to a cad and packed off to India. Her foppish husband seems to have no idea how dangerous it can be to be a British army officer thrown into colonial intrigues, but Penelope quickly realizes how much trouble they are in. The local ruler is dangerously insane, the French are slinking around, and she would swear someone is trying to kill them. But most dangerous of all might be the charming officer assigned as their escort, who is reminding Penelope that not all men are as useless as her husband...
Thingummies: When we last left this series, Penelope was a minor character who gets married off to a total jerk while the protagonist's beau's best friend pines for her. Never quite sure why that last detail was provided--I had thought that he would follow Penelope and Freddy to India and win her back, but in Penelope's first chapter, we're introduced to the dashing Alex who will clearly be the love interest for this novel. Poor best friend never actually appears.
Meanwhile in modern London, Eloise (the historian researching Penelope's friends and their espionage-ish activities) has little new to add to her own kind of tepid romance and so unsuccessfully tries to pair off her boyfriend's sister. We see very little of Eloise, actually. The author's run out of ideas for her own insert, and so she's appeared less and less in each book. Which is best, really, since it's the historical spies and their affairs that are why I keep coming back.
I really liked this one, mostly because I really liked Penelope. It's of utmost importance to like the protagonists in a romance. In sf or fantasy or mysteries or thrillers, the plot is usually the most important part of the novel (with world-building being a close second for the first two). In literary fiction, it's style that's king. This doesn't mean that you don't want the characters to be engaging, but if the characters aren't quite right, the book can still come out ok. (Not perfect, but at least enjoyable.) In romance, the plot is secondary--the ultimate goal is the characters' emotional journey, and to enjoy the ride, you need to identify with the characters. Penelope is delightful--impulsive without being flighty, sarcastic, funny, smart, and brave. She makes some really bad decisions, but they're for understandable reasons.
I think a lot of the appeal here is that the obstacles to the happy ending really work. Too often, the protagonists fall in love for stupid reasons and resist their love for equally stupid reasons. Penelope has excellent motivations for bucking society's constraints and for distrusting men in general. Her own backstory explains well why she would marry Freddy, why she can't just leave him, and why she would find Alex appealing. Alex likewise has good reasons for falling for Pen. The pair also have good reasons for trying to resist their mutual attraction, and it's not just the fact that Penelope's already married. She very legitimately suspects that he might be the spy she's trying to root out. He rightfully believes from her initial behavior that she's a spoiled brat. When presented with suitable evidence to the contrary, each are capable of changing their minds. No idiot balls here.
There is some evidence that this book was written in haste. There are some plot threads that get dropped and never picked up, including a Chekov's gun that stays on the wall. There's also a couple places where it's clear that the author meant to write a scene and lost track of it. It's nothing that disrupts the flow of the story, just places where things get missed because of viewpoint changes. At one point, Penelope is refusing to speak to Alex. From his view, he's baffled. It's clearly set up so we can switch to Pen and have her angst--she has a good reason she's avoiding him. But the plot pulls us past this point of introspection while still in Alex's view. By the time we're back in Penelope's head, she's already resolved her internal conflict, which gets handwaved away in a sentence about how she had thought X but no longer could feel that way because of Y. It all makes sense, but it's pretty obvious that the author had meant to have a scene before Penelope changes her mind, and wrote herself into a bit of a corner and never went back and fixed it.
It's not so bothersome as to ruin the book, though. I do think Willig's gotten stronger in each installment. Spies! Angst! Understandable misunderstandings! Just keep on phasing out poor neurotic Eloise, thanks.
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Date: 2011-06-13 01:14 pm (UTC)From:I am planning to do a big summary at the end of the year. There are definitely some scores that I've changed my mind about after thinking about it for a little longer. I'll do a "Best/Worst" list. And I've been actually tracking some data like average score, genre, and gender of author that I'm interested to see how it all tallies up at the end. If I'm feeling super-creative, there may even be graphs.