So, I'm reading this book...
Oct. 28th, 2008 09:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateBecause of course it's not as if I have anything better to be doing just now. But it's out from the library, and ought to go back before NaNo (ha), and so when I ran out of productive-brain last night, I sat down with it for a while and it ended up eating my brain until I dragged myself away at 2:30 in the morning. Oy.
Anyway, it's called The Magicians and Mrs Quent, and it's possibly one of the odder things I can recall reading. It's billed as novel new pseudo-regency romance in an magical alternate England, which it more or less is, but there's a lot of the more Dickensian seamy underside of things, and I keep meeting characters I know. I'm less than two thirds of the way through, but already our heroine has gone from a very promising intelligent bookish type to a composite of the elder Miss Bennetts and Miss Dashwood while our hero #1 (of 3 so far) who resembles Mr Bingley or perhaps Freddy Standen mainly because he puts his considerable intelligence to work at not being intelligent is convinced to marry instead the rich Miss Gray for political reasons, thus allowing her to be forced by lawyer Mr Collins into becoming Miss Eyre. The book even presents a section in the first person to carry the point. However, it is our heroine who has a madman in the attic (her father, a former magician, whose madness she has been attempting to solve, and was just starting to get somewhere when she was uprooted...) and our Mr Rochester's madwoman lives in the possessed stand of wood down the road, and it is unclear which of a number of women she actually is, except that it has become clear that she is somehow related to the heroine.
And all this takes place in a land where it is necessary to consult an almanac to discover how long any given day or night will be, rife with political intrigue and unrest stemming from a rule-posting secret-service-operating parliament and a king whom half the populace would apparently prefer to replace with Bonnie Prince Charlie but daren't say so for fear of the gallows, and our non-romantic hero has gotten caught up in things far beyond him in which he would rather not be involved (and then abandoned by the narration when our heroine left the city) when he would be doing far better to run off to join the magician/actors. Not at all sure where this is going, but if our heroine attempts to marry Mr Quent, I will be much displeased with her.
And now I really must do something useful. Sigh.
Anyway, it's called The Magicians and Mrs Quent, and it's possibly one of the odder things I can recall reading. It's billed as novel new pseudo-regency romance in an magical alternate England, which it more or less is, but there's a lot of the more Dickensian seamy underside of things, and I keep meeting characters I know. I'm less than two thirds of the way through, but already our heroine has gone from a very promising intelligent bookish type to a composite of the elder Miss Bennetts and Miss Dashwood while our hero #1 (of 3 so far) who resembles Mr Bingley or perhaps Freddy Standen mainly because he puts his considerable intelligence to work at not being intelligent is convinced to marry instead the rich Miss Gray for political reasons, thus allowing her to be forced by lawyer Mr Collins into becoming Miss Eyre. The book even presents a section in the first person to carry the point. However, it is our heroine who has a madman in the attic (her father, a former magician, whose madness she has been attempting to solve, and was just starting to get somewhere when she was uprooted...) and our Mr Rochester's madwoman lives in the possessed stand of wood down the road, and it is unclear which of a number of women she actually is, except that it has become clear that she is somehow related to the heroine.
And all this takes place in a land where it is necessary to consult an almanac to discover how long any given day or night will be, rife with political intrigue and unrest stemming from a rule-posting secret-service-operating parliament and a king whom half the populace would apparently prefer to replace with Bonnie Prince Charlie but daren't say so for fear of the gallows, and our non-romantic hero has gotten caught up in things far beyond him in which he would rather not be involved (and then abandoned by the narration when our heroine left the city) when he would be doing far better to run off to join the magician/actors. Not at all sure where this is going, but if our heroine attempts to marry Mr Quent, I will be much displeased with her.
And now I really must do something useful. Sigh.