Art, marriage, and illusion
Aug. 17th, 2014 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI took yesterday off. From what, you ask? From EVERYTHING. Instead, I did a thing that I need to do every now and again or I melt into a puddle of useless stressed-out procrastinatoriness, which is to sit on my ass and read an entire novel in 24 hours or less.
Yesterday’s entire novel was Shades of Milk and Honey, the first book in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamourist Histories series. I deviously acquired this book right out from under Robert’s nose at Readercon, because I am A+ at acquiring books, so I figured I had to read it soon so I could pass it on before Robert gets too grumpy at me. Anyway, it was quite a perfect book for sitting on one’s ass all day avoiding one’s responsibilities, particularly when the last book one has read was a very serious and upsetting history about mass death.
Shades of Milk and Honey is set in the same country lower-gentry Regency milieu as Jane Austen’s novels, occasionally to the point of seeming a bit derivative, but with one major difference—one of the essential accomplishments for a lady of quality was mastery of glamour, or illusion magic. Glamour involves manipulating fold of ether to create sights, sounds, smells, or even heat or cold. Like a lot of the arts in the Regency era, ladies were expected to be technically proficient and tasteful at it in order to be accomplished, but the highly-trained master artists were mostly men.
This story follows Jane Ellsworth, a plain but artistically talented young spinster of twenty-eight, as she wrestles to avoid admitting her inevitable fate as an old maid and tries to watch out for her beautiful, impetuous, charming, but less-artistic sister Melody. Their father is keen for them to be married well because the estate is entailed (because of course); their mother is largely occupied with vague nervous conditions that she complains of at length in order to get attention, a la Mrs. Bennett. Both sisters might be developing a crush on their unfailingly polite neighbor Mr. Dunkirk, who has a great appreciation for the arts, and befriend his young sister who might have something disreputable in her past, a la Georgiana Darcy. A master illusionist also shows up and is grumpy; a dashing young officer from their childhood shows up and is dashing and all grown up now; love triangles and such ensue.
Honestly, this book has some funny dialogue and some occasional comments on the lack of opportunities for women, but you can tell that all the people comparing it to Austen think of Austen primarily as a romance novelist, whereas I tend to think of Austen as a comic writer and social critic, and by those standards it’s really not that Austenian. Many of the plot points and characterization elements are, as previously mentioned, pretty identical to Austen, but Downton Abbey also used the entailment plot device and I still like it.
The book is quite thoroughly researched, and Kowal reproduces the literary styling, spelling, and tone of Regency-era writing extremely faithfully, so that apart from the magic, the book reads quite a bit like reading actual late eighteenth/early nineteenth century midlist fiction. Sometimes it’s a little weird considering that I was reading an American edition of the book and I know that Kowal is an American author, but it definitely had an atmospheric effect, except for one sentence where “colour” was overzealously proofed to “color,” which I might not have noticed except that the sentence had the word “colour” in it twice and only once was Americanized.
I feel like this is definitely one of those “people who like this sort of thing will certainly like this thing” pieces, it’s nice and fluffy and scratches an itch for both my inner fantasy genre junkie and my inner Masterpiece Theater-watching junkie. I loved it while I was reading it, and pretty much as soon as I finished and starting trying to think of things to write in this review I was like “Actually, there’s not much there there…” which, okay, so there’s not. I will probably read the sequels, at some point when I have worn myself down from serious reading and am probably at a beach or on vacation or something, because it was charming and delightful and said pretty things about art, and also I appreciated the complete misdirection in how the romance unfolded.
Yesterday’s entire novel was Shades of Milk and Honey, the first book in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamourist Histories series. I deviously acquired this book right out from under Robert’s nose at Readercon, because I am A+ at acquiring books, so I figured I had to read it soon so I could pass it on before Robert gets too grumpy at me. Anyway, it was quite a perfect book for sitting on one’s ass all day avoiding one’s responsibilities, particularly when the last book one has read was a very serious and upsetting history about mass death.
Shades of Milk and Honey is set in the same country lower-gentry Regency milieu as Jane Austen’s novels, occasionally to the point of seeming a bit derivative, but with one major difference—one of the essential accomplishments for a lady of quality was mastery of glamour, or illusion magic. Glamour involves manipulating fold of ether to create sights, sounds, smells, or even heat or cold. Like a lot of the arts in the Regency era, ladies were expected to be technically proficient and tasteful at it in order to be accomplished, but the highly-trained master artists were mostly men.
This story follows Jane Ellsworth, a plain but artistically talented young spinster of twenty-eight, as she wrestles to avoid admitting her inevitable fate as an old maid and tries to watch out for her beautiful, impetuous, charming, but less-artistic sister Melody. Their father is keen for them to be married well because the estate is entailed (because of course); their mother is largely occupied with vague nervous conditions that she complains of at length in order to get attention, a la Mrs. Bennett. Both sisters might be developing a crush on their unfailingly polite neighbor Mr. Dunkirk, who has a great appreciation for the arts, and befriend his young sister who might have something disreputable in her past, a la Georgiana Darcy. A master illusionist also shows up and is grumpy; a dashing young officer from their childhood shows up and is dashing and all grown up now; love triangles and such ensue.
Honestly, this book has some funny dialogue and some occasional comments on the lack of opportunities for women, but you can tell that all the people comparing it to Austen think of Austen primarily as a romance novelist, whereas I tend to think of Austen as a comic writer and social critic, and by those standards it’s really not that Austenian. Many of the plot points and characterization elements are, as previously mentioned, pretty identical to Austen, but Downton Abbey also used the entailment plot device and I still like it.
The book is quite thoroughly researched, and Kowal reproduces the literary styling, spelling, and tone of Regency-era writing extremely faithfully, so that apart from the magic, the book reads quite a bit like reading actual late eighteenth/early nineteenth century midlist fiction. Sometimes it’s a little weird considering that I was reading an American edition of the book and I know that Kowal is an American author, but it definitely had an atmospheric effect, except for one sentence where “colour” was overzealously proofed to “color,” which I might not have noticed except that the sentence had the word “colour” in it twice and only once was Americanized.
I feel like this is definitely one of those “people who like this sort of thing will certainly like this thing” pieces, it’s nice and fluffy and scratches an itch for both my inner fantasy genre junkie and my inner Masterpiece Theater-watching junkie. I loved it while I was reading it, and pretty much as soon as I finished and starting trying to think of things to write in this review I was like “Actually, there’s not much there there…” which, okay, so there’s not. I will probably read the sequels, at some point when I have worn myself down from serious reading and am probably at a beach or on vacation or something, because it was charming and delightful and said pretty things about art, and also I appreciated the complete misdirection in how the romance unfolded.