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3.75 AVERAGE
3.75 AVERAGE
1.5 stars
Ugh this sucked. Sorry in advance to whoever I'm going to offend with this review because I know this is a popular book but it did not work for me.
A lot of people who don't like this don't like it because for a large part of the book, the heroine Annique is sort of the "prisoner" of the hero. So if you really dislike the idea of this (no matter how boring the hero is) then this book may rub you the wrong way. That's not at all what bothered me.
This takes place during the Napoleonic Wars and Annique Villiers is a French spy that has the Albion Papers- papers that detail Napoleons plan of invading Britain. Robert Gray is high up in the food chain of the British spy network. So we kind of have this opposing spy thing going on which could be interesting. The book opens and both Annique and Gray are captured in France by the ruthless Leblanc, a mustache twirling villain of the Disney variety- that is there really isn't a ton of depth to him except that he's... evil. And both Annique and Gray have to use their wits to escape. But Gray realizes how important Annique is with knowing about the Albion plans and all, so he and his 2 other spy colleagues end up not allowing her to escape them.
The book started out reasonably- we get to learn about Annique's and Gray's prowess with their super spy skills. It was interesting seeing how she dealt with Gray when she realized that he knew who she was. But honestly the book is just downhill from the beginning and just gets worse and worse.
First, the whole romance was a mess. I couldn't get into it at all. It's mainly based on attraction and that's about it. There was so much betraying body that I was ready to fling the book out the window. Annique devolves into a simpering girl who can't control the ~feelings~ or ~desire~ she has for Gray despite her unideal situation. And this starts pretty early on. I HATE betraying body with the passion of a thousand fiery suns.
Then I just didn't get Annique's character motivations. Okay so she's a French spy so you'd think she's all team "Allez les bleus!" but really she just doesn't know what the heck to do with the plans. It seems like she has no loyalty to the French state and Napoleon, and her arch nemesis is Leblanc, a Frenchman who wants the plans. So I guess if she had no loyalty to the French why was it like pulling teeth through this book to get the plans to the British? Now I can understand if she's pretty nationalist, but to be honest it seems like her only moral framework is that she doesn't want to kill people. In fact she has so many opportunities to kill her enemies who would definitely rape and torture her before killing her but nope! She can't do that. In what spy world?! I just hate when female characters are written like that. So anyway- it seems like she just wants to save lives- which makes her withholding the Albion plans pretty dumb.
The actual spy story could have been 500% more interesting than it actually was. A lot of this was just Annique + Gray + 2 sidekicks wandering through the countryside with the occasional attack that of course they all make it through. Then Annique gets dumber as the book moves along. She peaked at the very beginning. She strikes me as someone who cannot control her emotions or feelings and becomes a mess by the end of things. How her dialogue was written also began to get on my nerves- it was like every sentence she said was said as if she was explaining something to a 5 year old. Like this forced practicality and slowness which was so annoying.
This relationship is so LAME. Most of the book is Gray and Annique going around in circles, faffing about and by 75% the relationship is still what it was at around the 30% mark. It was the same internal conflict over and over- and fine! Have the conflict! But there was this boring sort of inevitability that all this conflict really was for nothing because Annique just couldn't control herself around Gray.
Then the author was desperate to make Gray a #niceguy. Since he's Annique's captor she wanted to make him extra caring so readers could swoon over him but honestly, if you're going to write a captor story, then write a captor story. There were so many instances of Gray being forced into the #niceguy box when it would have been way more interesting if there were different conflicts at play. Gray thus became super boring to me. The thing that bothers me is when writers create this premise that can be a bit darker or something with very real stakes (like opposite sides during the Napoleonic wars) but then tries to backtrack on the characters and make them the next Mother Theresa. That's boring and dumb. If you want a book full of nice guys then just read something that's like, not a dangerous spy premise. For example, Gray ends up hurting Annique in a minor way due to self defense (literally Annique was choking him to death) and then instead of being super freaked out that someone was trying to kill him, he's so shook that he thrashed and hit Annique in the stomach and goes to coddling her and being so distraught he hit her. She was going to potentially kill you. You don't apologize for saving yourself if someone is hurting you- okay???
I skimmed/skipped the last 25%. Ugh.
Ugh this sucked. Sorry in advance to whoever I'm going to offend with this review because I know this is a popular book but it did not work for me.
A lot of people who don't like this don't like it because for a large part of the book, the heroine Annique is sort of the "prisoner" of the hero. So if you really dislike the idea of this (no matter how boring the hero is) then this book may rub you the wrong way. That's not at all what bothered me.
This takes place during the Napoleonic Wars and Annique Villiers is a French spy that has the Albion Papers- papers that detail Napoleons plan of invading Britain. Robert Gray is high up in the food chain of the British spy network. So we kind of have this opposing spy thing going on which could be interesting. The book opens and both Annique and Gray are captured in France by the ruthless Leblanc, a mustache twirling villain of the Disney variety- that is there really isn't a ton of depth to him except that he's... evil. And both Annique and Gray have to use their wits to escape. But Gray realizes how important Annique is with knowing about the Albion plans and all, so he and his 2 other spy colleagues end up not allowing her to escape them.
The book started out reasonably- we get to learn about Annique's and Gray's prowess with their super spy skills. It was interesting seeing how she dealt with Gray when she realized that he knew who she was. But honestly the book is just downhill from the beginning and just gets worse and worse.
First, the whole romance was a mess. I couldn't get into it at all. It's mainly based on attraction and that's about it. There was so much betraying body that I was ready to fling the book out the window. Annique devolves into a simpering girl who can't control the ~feelings~ or ~desire~ she has for Gray despite her unideal situation. And this starts pretty early on. I HATE betraying body with the passion of a thousand fiery suns.
Then I just didn't get Annique's character motivations. Okay so she's a French spy so you'd think she's all team "Allez les bleus!" but really she just doesn't know what the heck to do with the plans. It seems like she has no loyalty to the French state and Napoleon, and her arch nemesis is Leblanc, a Frenchman who wants the plans. So I guess if she had no loyalty to the French why was it like pulling teeth through this book to get the plans to the British? Now I can understand if she's pretty nationalist, but to be honest it seems like her only moral framework is that she doesn't want to kill people. In fact she has so many opportunities to kill her enemies who would definitely rape and torture her before killing her but nope! She can't do that. In what spy world?! I just hate when female characters are written like that. So anyway- it seems like she just wants to save lives- which makes her withholding the Albion plans pretty dumb.
The actual spy story could have been 500% more interesting than it actually was. A lot of this was just Annique + Gray + 2 sidekicks wandering through the countryside with the occasional attack that of course they all make it through. Then Annique gets dumber as the book moves along. She peaked at the very beginning. She strikes me as someone who cannot control her emotions or feelings and becomes a mess by the end of things. How her dialogue was written also began to get on my nerves- it was like every sentence she said was said as if she was explaining something to a 5 year old. Like this forced practicality and slowness which was so annoying.
This relationship is so LAME. Most of the book is Gray and Annique going around in circles, faffing about and by 75% the relationship is still what it was at around the 30% mark. It was the same internal conflict over and over- and fine! Have the conflict! But there was this boring sort of inevitability that all this conflict really was for nothing because Annique just couldn't control herself around Gray.
Then the author was desperate to make Gray a #niceguy. Since he's Annique's captor she wanted to make him extra caring so readers could swoon over him but honestly, if you're going to write a captor story, then write a captor story. There were so many instances of Gray being forced into the #niceguy box when it would have been way more interesting if there were different conflicts at play. Gray thus became super boring to me. The thing that bothers me is when writers create this premise that can be a bit darker or something with very real stakes (like opposite sides during the Napoleonic wars) but then tries to backtrack on the characters and make them the next Mother Theresa. That's boring and dumb. If you want a book full of nice guys then just read something that's like, not a dangerous spy premise. For example, Gray ends up hurting Annique in a minor way due to self defense (literally Annique was choking him to death) and then instead of being super freaked out that someone was trying to kill him, he's so shook that he thrashed and hit Annique in the stomach and goes to coddling her and being so distraught he hit her. She was going to potentially kill you. You don't apologize for saving yourself if someone is hurting you- okay???
I skimmed/skipped the last 25%. Ugh.
At first, I wasn't sure if I liked it enough to finish it. It felt too instalovey for my tastes, but I came around to it because the story development worked really well. Not bad.
fun to read; lots of detail and good writing. Angelique was a bit too perfect especially given that she was blind.
More than once as I read this book about Annique’s incredible tenacity, skill, and fortitude as a spy who is navigating a complex web of treachery, corruption, & political intrigue in the Napoleonic era, I thought of Sydney Bristow from ABC’s early 2000s gem, ALIAS. I was glued to my kindle and a nail-biting mess, but I loved every twist and turn.
For lovers of Outlander and The Count of Monte Cristo, this is an action-packed historical fiction with a sexy romantic subplot. Annique was beyond badass and Grey was a difficult, complex love interest. I found him always held at a distance from a narrative standpoint—I was never deeply immersed in his mind like Annique—and so I wasn’t quite as sold on him as I wanted to be. But ultimately this book is a winner for me for the sheer originality of its plot, the heroine’s absolutely badassery, and a writing style that kept me hooked and guessing until the very last page.
For lovers of Outlander and The Count of Monte Cristo, this is an action-packed historical fiction with a sexy romantic subplot. Annique was beyond badass and Grey was a difficult, complex love interest. I found him always held at a distance from a narrative standpoint—I was never deeply immersed in his mind like Annique—and so I wasn’t quite as sold on him as I wanted to be. But ultimately this book is a winner for me for the sheer originality of its plot, the heroine’s absolutely badassery, and a writing style that kept me hooked and guessing until the very last page.
I'm not sure how to rate this. I think 3 stars is too low but 4 stars is a little bit too much. Possibly. Maybe a 3.75?
[b:The Spymaster's Lady|959745|The Spymaster's Lady (Spymasters, #1)|Joanna Bourne|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1345986088s/959745.jpg|944648] is different from a lot of HR that I've been reading lately so I enjoyed that. I don't I've read many that involve spies and all that stuff so that was fun. The writing was pretty good. I didn't find Grey to be very memorable at all though, I never really got a good feel of him and the romance was kind of lacking for me. It all happened very quickly, I swear they fell in love over the space of a couple of days and the book only took place over a week or two. Annique... Annique is a difficult one to get an accurate feeling on. At times I loved her, she never gave up, she fought and she was always coming up with ways to get out of the messes that she found herself in. Her voice... I alternated between getting a 'Poirot' feel from her (I think, possibly, because of her speech patterns) and getting a little girl vibe. I got a little bit creeped out when I got the little girl vibes, I know she's young but she came across a lot younger at times and when paired with Grey... little bit gross.
I was a little bit disappointed that
I had some issues but overall it was a fun read and I would like to read more of this series. I'm especially looking forward to Adrian's story - I loved him!!
[b:The Spymaster's Lady|959745|The Spymaster's Lady (Spymasters, #1)|Joanna Bourne|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1345986088s/959745.jpg|944648] is different from a lot of HR that I've been reading lately so I enjoyed that. I don't I've read many that involve spies and all that stuff so that was fun. The writing was pretty good. I didn't find Grey to be very memorable at all though, I never really got a good feel of him and the romance was kind of lacking for me. It all happened very quickly, I swear they fell in love over the space of a couple of days and the book only took place over a week or two. Annique... Annique is a difficult one to get an accurate feeling on. At times I loved her, she never gave up, she fought and she was always coming up with ways to get out of the messes that she found herself in. Her voice... I alternated between getting a 'Poirot' feel from her (I think, possibly, because of her speech patterns) and getting a little girl vibe. I got a little bit creeped out when I got the little girl vibes, I know she's young but she came across a lot younger at times and when paired with Grey... little bit gross.
I was a little bit disappointed that
Spoiler
Annique got her sight back. I loved it when she was blind, not because I'm a horrible person, but I loved the way she had adapted and still got shit done. The only thing that really saved it was that getting her sight back caused her to not know Grey when she arrived in Kent which helped him get her to the house in London.I had some issues but overall it was a fun read and I would like to read more of this series. I'm especially looking forward to Adrian's story - I loved him!!
A lot of buzz on-line, and I see why--very fresh, smart historical romance, but almost a little too clever and a little too much with the twists and the cat and mouse stuff?
Hugely enjoyable, though I admit I liked the characters and the extremely fast-paced, relatively complex plot more than the romance. The romance was wonderful in the first half but undercooked in the second.
adventurous
emotional
funny
fast-paced
adventurous
dark
emotional
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I feel like the best thing to say about this is that it was genuinely kind of a rollicking good time for a book where a significant part of the plot hinged on someone being blind due to an injury to their optic nerve and then having their vision restored by running into a tree branch. I'm not putting that behind a spoiler cut, I feel like anyone deserves to know ahead of time. It says a lot.
Anyway, this is like... the best-written historical romance I've ever read, unless you count Gabaldon, and as a result it's kind of a joy on the dialogue level most of the time. It's genuinely funny. I did honestly like Annique, who was a fun character to follow. I rarely have cause to say this of secondary characters in category romance, who so often resemble animatronics in a display case, but I really liked several of the secondary characters.
Actually, one of them (Adrian) I liked enough that I kept wondering why he wasn't the love interest of... either of the main characters, in fact. Historical het romance is a strange, conservative ecosystem that puts TV shows to shame even when it comes to masculinity anxiety - it's not just that the central romances are heterosexual, but the world is blisteringly and improbably heterosexual. People are paired off faithfully into married couples that look at ne'er another bosom, unless they're blackguards or randos. The consequence however is that the dear brothers-in-arms friendships get really homoerotic (as all repressedly homophobic things do...) because of how unspeakable homoeroticism is. Anyway, I'm just musing on notoriously beautiful razor-wit hurt/comfort lad Adrian and how everyone around him is more attracted to him than they are to each other, whether that is Annique or Grey. That's what happens in Romance Heterosexualandia where all meet cutes have the oppressive force of arranged marriages. Diana Gabaldon, at least, is aware of that.
This sort of brings me to the bad. I'm not counting "improbable plot" here as the bad, or even "dumb decisions" as the bad although I could do without another romance heroine running off at the 80% mark... it's that the romance is dreadful. Other reviewers have covered the weird patronizing Stockholm thing; I can only say that the hero was a big heap of dull iron filings at best (they so often are...) and sort of a creep the rest of the time, but a creep in that like conservative romance writer world way, where in a spy vs spy romance the female spy has to shockingly turn out to be 19 and a virgin. God spare us from people turning out to be virgins. I don't want to hear about 19-year-old virgins. I certainly am not interested in their confused sexual awakenings at the hands of weird, paternalistic love interests ten years their senior. Anything where a man thinks protectively of a woman (or any other gender arrangement in the remaining 0.01% of probability) something like "she definitely wasn't a whore, he could tell!": he definitely could not. Source: I'm a whore, no one can tell except when I helpfully make an announcement like this. But it does make him sound more like a Republican!
(The book is also full of rape, attempted rape, and even more full of threats of rape. This is pretty de rigeur but I also think this book was even more so like this because it was constantly struggling to justify why Annique should stick with one set of captors and not others circumstantially, and the answer was always "because everyone else in the universe is a rapist, except for the protagonists, who are lovely gentlemen." So there's this whole part where she's captured by the protagonist British spies, and then they don't hand her over to the other British spies who the narrative points out are rapists. This might sound more ordinary on the face of it narratively but I have to note here that this is after they've been running from her enemy rival, French Rapist Spy, and his henchman, French Even More Of A Rapist Henchman. I honestly think without all the rapists it would have gotten harder to justify why Annique was giving Grey and such the time of day increasingly. This is a bad sign in a plot.)
The point is more that... yes, this all morally puts me off and gets under my skin as an abominable, Phyllis Schlafly-esque vision of reality, but it also just makes the romance element extremely dull and skimmable. You can tell that surrounding culture has really gotten to a book when the rest of it it is still pretty good, contains more than one (and more than three or four) sympathetic character, has more than one old hot silver fox of a spymaster* dude (Soulier! Try not being straight!), is funny, has kind of an entertaining commercial-period voice, etc., and can still coexist with all this mandatory virgin worship and 1950s age/power differentials and "oh even a capable woman is a wild colt, to be approached..." that's like, did the author hit her head on a tree branch too at some point? But nah, it's just the genre.
These "sort of a gentleman but sort of bad but nice but dark but good but with a dangerous side" heroes are really the worst though. There are some lessons to be recalled about paint mixing in first grade.
*in this footnote I must say that the book title is misleading in spite of itself; the book really tries to seed the idea that Robert Grey Warham-Wexville Putney-Chambers Ffoulkes the III or what have you is a spymaster, but also for plot purposes has to contain multiple actual spymasters, including an attractive older British one, an attractive older French one, and an offscreen misogynistic French one. Grey is at best a spy middle manager. Also this does seem to suffer from Time Traveler's Wife syndrome here a bit in insulting Annique's calling, which is rather the stuff of the entire plot, so this is less "The Spymaster's Lady" and more "The Spy's Spy."
Anyway, this is like... the best-written historical romance I've ever read, unless you count Gabaldon, and as a result it's kind of a joy on the dialogue level most of the time. It's genuinely funny. I did honestly like Annique, who was a fun character to follow. I rarely have cause to say this of secondary characters in category romance, who so often resemble animatronics in a display case, but I really liked several of the secondary characters.
Actually, one of them (Adrian) I liked enough that I kept wondering why he wasn't the love interest of... either of the main characters, in fact. Historical het romance is a strange, conservative ecosystem that puts TV shows to shame even when it comes to masculinity anxiety - it's not just that the central romances are heterosexual, but the world is blisteringly and improbably heterosexual. People are paired off faithfully into married couples that look at ne'er another bosom, unless they're blackguards or randos. The consequence however is that the dear brothers-in-arms friendships get really homoerotic (as all repressedly homophobic things do...) because of how unspeakable homoeroticism is. Anyway, I'm just musing on notoriously beautiful razor-wit hurt/comfort lad Adrian and how everyone around him is more attracted to him than they are to each other, whether that is Annique or Grey. That's what happens in Romance Heterosexualandia where all meet cutes have the oppressive force of arranged marriages. Diana Gabaldon, at least, is aware of that.
This sort of brings me to the bad. I'm not counting "improbable plot" here as the bad, or even "dumb decisions" as the bad although I could do without another romance heroine running off at the 80% mark... it's that the romance is dreadful. Other reviewers have covered the weird patronizing Stockholm thing; I can only say that the hero was a big heap of dull iron filings at best (they so often are...) and sort of a creep the rest of the time, but a creep in that like conservative romance writer world way, where in a spy vs spy romance the female spy has to shockingly turn out to be 19 and a virgin. God spare us from people turning out to be virgins. I don't want to hear about 19-year-old virgins. I certainly am not interested in their confused sexual awakenings at the hands of weird, paternalistic love interests ten years their senior. Anything where a man thinks protectively of a woman (or any other gender arrangement in the remaining 0.01% of probability) something like "she definitely wasn't a whore, he could tell!": he definitely could not. Source: I'm a whore, no one can tell except when I helpfully make an announcement like this. But it does make him sound more like a Republican!
(The book is also full of rape, attempted rape, and even more full of threats of rape. This is pretty de rigeur but I also think this book was even more so like this because it was constantly struggling to justify why Annique should stick with one set of captors and not others circumstantially, and the answer was always "because everyone else in the universe is a rapist, except for the protagonists, who are lovely gentlemen." So there's this whole part where she's captured by the protagonist British spies, and then they don't hand her over to the other British spies who the narrative points out are rapists. This might sound more ordinary on the face of it narratively but I have to note here that this is after they've been running from her enemy rival, French Rapist Spy, and his henchman, French Even More Of A Rapist Henchman. I honestly think without all the rapists it would have gotten harder to justify why Annique was giving Grey and such the time of day increasingly. This is a bad sign in a plot.)
The point is more that... yes, this all morally puts me off and gets under my skin as an abominable, Phyllis Schlafly-esque vision of reality, but it also just makes the romance element extremely dull and skimmable. You can tell that surrounding culture has really gotten to a book when the rest of it it is still pretty good, contains more than one (and more than three or four) sympathetic character, has more than one old hot silver fox of a spymaster* dude (Soulier! Try not being straight!), is funny, has kind of an entertaining commercial-period voice, etc., and can still coexist with all this mandatory virgin worship and 1950s age/power differentials and "oh even a capable woman is a wild colt, to be approached..." that's like, did the author hit her head on a tree branch too at some point? But nah, it's just the genre.
These "sort of a gentleman but sort of bad but nice but dark but good but with a dangerous side" heroes are really the worst though. There are some lessons to be recalled about paint mixing in first grade.
*in this footnote I must say that the book title is misleading in spite of itself; the book really tries to seed the idea that Robert Grey Warham-Wexville Putney-Chambers Ffoulkes the III or what have you is a spymaster, but also for plot purposes has to contain multiple actual spymasters, including an attractive older British one, an attractive older French one, and an offscreen misogynistic French one. Grey is at best a spy middle manager. Also this does seem to suffer from Time Traveler's Wife syndrome here a bit in insulting Annique's calling, which is rather the stuff of the entire plot, so this is less "The Spymaster's Lady" and more "The Spy's Spy."