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codalion 's review for:
The Spymaster's Lady
by Joanna Bourne
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."