The Athena Club reconvenes

[bloodygranuaile]

To kick off my vow not to read any more goddamn politics books until after Readercon, I picked up a copy of Theodora Goss' European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman from the library. It's the sequel to The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, which I read when it was first published and loved. I had somehow completely missed it when the sequel was published, but having recently had it brought to my attention, it was difficult to forget about again.

 

Given how much I like this series, it might seem odd that my main complaint about European Travel is that there is too much of it. But there is: at over 700 pages, it has 300 pages over its predecessor; in addition, I don't think it really needed to be 700 pages. Given that the style doesn't do much at all to mimic 19th-century overwriting, it just reads like a modern novel that needed another round of cuts. Especially given that part of the novel's structure deliberately includes the action being constantly interrupted with asides, once I started feeling that it was dragging, it was all too easy for Copy Editor Brain to turn on and for me to start looking for places I would have cut words if I were doing a pass on the manuscript. I think most of the asides could have been about half as many words; they tended to stray one step too far away to keep up a witty tension and just became rambly, and lampshading the problem--as the characters frequently do--only adds to it, it doesn't fix it. At one point about halfway through the book, one character asks a question and the other character "shrugged as if to indicate that she had no idea," and I got so irrationally angry that I had to put the book down a for a minute, like I know what shrugging means, dammit! At least it didn't say she shrugged her shoulders. I'm generally OK with leisurely pacing, but the words in sentences should add some sort of meaning to them.

 

Other than the hundred pages worth of tightening it needed, I did thoroughly enjoy this book. It's basically Gothic classics fanfiction, and I loooove Gothic classics fanfiction, especially in the YA girls' adventure mould. This book brings in a lot more Dracula-related stuff, as was teased at the end of Alchemist's Daughter, and it does not disappoint. We don't just meet Mina Murray, Count Dracula, and Lucinda van Helsing, but we also meet Carmilla and her girlfriend, get some gossip about Lord Ruthven, go on spy adventures with Irene Adler (now Irene Norton), and get psychoanalyzed by one Dr. Sigmund Freud in Vienna. 

 

The plot can most accurately be described as a series of hijinks and shenanigans, hitting many classic plot devices, like getting kidnapped and having to wear lots of disguises, and also some slightly more unusual ones, like successfully breaking into and then back out of a mental asylum, a period-appropriate twist on your classic jailbreak. There is a good deal of food porn, and now I'm craving chicken paprikash even though it's not really the season for it. It does all pull together into a unifying plot with serious ethical themes about the limits of science and the ethics of human experimentation, but mostly it's a jolly good ride fighting mad vampires and trying to get a bunch of snotty old Victorian scientist dudes to stop screwing up. I have every intention of reading the third book in what has now been officially announced as a trilogy, which will apparently have to do with mesmerism.