2022 Regency romance. Marianne Simpson boxes at Farnham's Fantastical
Female Fayre, run by her uncle. She has good reason to be suspicious
of aristocratic men. But the Duke of Staunton has need of her…
It's interestingly convoluted: Marianne thought she was married
to a Bad Baron, but he turned out to have faked it all, and naturally
her version of events wan't believed. That same Bad Baron is now
requiring Marianne's presence in France as part of the cost of
ransoming Staunton's brother, thought dead in the recent war.
Everything folds back on itself, leaving the setup admirably compact,
if sometimes a little claustrophobic.
This feels as if it could have been a much longer book. Marianne and
the Duke have to reach an armed neutrality (with him acting the part
of her trainer); then they set off on their trip into France, one of
the many travelling companies taking advantage of the end of the war;
then Napoleon escapes from Elba while the company is still there…
And there's a revelation at about the three-quarters mark which throws
everything sideways, feeling almost as though it had come from a
different story entirely, set on a rather larger stage. Which I don't
mind, exactly, but both of these stories, before and after that
revelation, were interesting in themselves, and I'd have liked to read
both of them separately rather than having one supplanted by the
other.
Chunks of this are anachronistic, but it feels as though they're being
used with respect and in a way that makes sense, even if those events
didn't actually happen just then. I was somewhat thrown by the big
surprise, but Spencer makes it work, at least enough for me to enjoy
going along for the ride.
(This is the first of a trilogy, and the other two inevitable pairings
are set up here. No mystery about what'll happen there, and I rather
suspect the third volume will be the most enjoyable.)