georgiewhoissarahdrew 's review for:

And Only to Deceive by Tasha Alexander

2.0

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This is a difficult one. There are lots of things I liked about the book - its late Victorian setting, the heroine's awful mother stealing every scene she's in, the involvement of The Iliad (in all its English translations, and the ancient Greek too), a good sense of period detail and a really intriguing backstory. The way that the late Lord Ashton's diaries reveal a more complex character than his public image showed is ingenious and moving.

It's just that you know you're in trouble with a book when the most interesting character in it died 18 months before the start. Lady Ashton's dead husband - his motivations, his private reminiscences, his wide-ranging interests - is more fleshed out than the heroine herself or any of her friends and acquaintances. Lady Ashton herself is given such a pedestrian voice - the whole book is in the first person, and she seems to speak & think in complete paragraphs, with a stilted vocabulary - that the force of her passion (she discovers the joy of Ancient Greek art and literature) is undermined by the delivery. The plot is a little slow, and apart from flashes of humour from the villain, there is no real characterisation. A real pity, because the concept was a good one.

I think I'll read the sequel, though, to see if the style matures.