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ana3333 's review for:
The Grand Tour: Being a Revelation of Matters of High Confidentiality and Greatest Importance, Including Extracts from the Intimate Di
by Caroline Stevermer, Patricia C. Wrede
A surprisingly sharp decline in quality compared to the first. Unfortunately, this one lacks much of the energy and fun of the first. Instead of getting the feeling that the authors had a good time writing this book, it feels more like they dutifully slogged through the whole thing.
The overall tone was fairly bland and the plot was pretty lackluster. There's probably a lot of little details I could complain about, like the way viewpoints switched back and forth several times in a single scene, or the fact that the cousins' adorable friendship seems to have disappeared.
But my main issue was that this book was insanely confusing. Like many other reviewers mentioned, I found myself completely incapable of telling the two couples apart. Pretty much any shred of personality anyone had was gone and every time one of the girls interacted with a man, I had to mentally stop and remember whether she was talking to her husband or her cousin-in-law. And the authors kept having each girl go off on adventures with her cousin-in-law, which I'd only realize at the end of the chapter when the dude shook her hand, said "jolly good show," and sent her off to kiss his best friend.
I don't know how the authors managed to make it so confusing. I read books where there's 20 different elven characters with made-up, 12-syllable long names that all end with "zar", but nothing has confounded me as much as two Regency girls married to two English fellows. The only distinguishing trait between the girls was that one had magic and one was clumsy, but then the girl with magic was getting into clumsy mishaps and the clumsy girl might have magic after all. And then the two men were completely interchangeable. One had magic and one didn't, but somehow, they still had the same personalities and did the same exact things constantly.
I almost recommend reading this just for the novel experience of being incredibly baffled by something that should be so simple.
The overall tone was fairly bland and the plot was pretty lackluster. There's probably a lot of little details I could complain about, like the way viewpoints switched back and forth several times in a single scene, or the fact that the cousins' adorable friendship seems to have disappeared.
But my main issue was that this book was insanely confusing. Like many other reviewers mentioned, I found myself completely incapable of telling the two couples apart. Pretty much any shred of personality anyone had was gone and every time one of the girls interacted with a man, I had to mentally stop and remember whether she was talking to her husband or her cousin-in-law. And the authors kept having each girl go off on adventures with her cousin-in-law, which I'd only realize at the end of the chapter when the dude shook her hand, said "jolly good show," and sent her off to kiss his best friend.
I don't know how the authors managed to make it so confusing. I read books where there's 20 different elven characters with made-up, 12-syllable long names that all end with "zar", but nothing has confounded me as much as two Regency girls married to two English fellows. The only distinguishing trait between the girls was that one had magic and one was clumsy, but then the girl with magic was getting into clumsy mishaps and the clumsy girl might have magic after all. And then the two men were completely interchangeable. One had magic and one didn't, but somehow, they still had the same personalities and did the same exact things constantly.
I almost recommend reading this just for the novel experience of being incredibly baffled by something that should be so simple.