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Feb. 20th, 2013 06:46 pmDanse de la Folie is Sherwood Smith's go at writing a very deliberately traditional and old-fashioned sort of feel-good Regency romance -- the Heyerian kind where everybody is aristocracy and nobody has sex and for the most part everybody is playing politely by the rules.
This book centers around a classic game of Engagement Chicken, which is a thing I discovered in a Heyer book a few years ago. To briefly summarize the rules, Engagement Chicken is a game for four players or more, in which everybody gets engaged to the wrong person and then sits around and stares hard at each other in the face of the rapidly approaching nuptials until somebody finally gives in and breaks their engagement. It seems to have been popular in the Regency and a certain kind of fantasy of manners.
-- and as a sidenote, if you have other fictional examples of games of Engagement Chicken, please share them because I still kind of want to populate a TVTropes page for this!
ANYWAY. Normally Engagement Chicken is a thing that annoys me, but here it doesn't bother me, mostly due to the fact that Player A's engagement and subsequent engagement-breaking have as much to do with social anxieties and her expectations of happiness in self-sufficiency as they do with pining after Player B.
I also enjoy the other heroine, a would-be writer of silly Gothics (I always like would-be writers of silly Gothics), and the friendship between the two of them, and the cheerfully non-evil stepmother and half-sisters. Overall it was a nice soothing Regency brain-bath, as it was designed to be, and my only actual quibble is the fact that I don't think we really needed to have That Mean Girl From High School -- who is sort of a stock Sherwood Smith character, and if we're going to have her I always want at least a little sympathy and development for her, and this is not the book for that.
This book centers around a classic game of Engagement Chicken, which is a thing I discovered in a Heyer book a few years ago. To briefly summarize the rules, Engagement Chicken is a game for four players or more, in which everybody gets engaged to the wrong person and then sits around and stares hard at each other in the face of the rapidly approaching nuptials until somebody finally gives in and breaks their engagement. It seems to have been popular in the Regency and a certain kind of fantasy of manners.
-- and as a sidenote, if you have other fictional examples of games of Engagement Chicken, please share them because I still kind of want to populate a TVTropes page for this!
ANYWAY. Normally Engagement Chicken is a thing that annoys me, but here it doesn't bother me, mostly due to the fact that Player A's engagement and subsequent engagement-breaking have as much to do with social anxieties and her expectations of happiness in self-sufficiency as they do with pining after Player B.
I also enjoy the other heroine, a would-be writer of silly Gothics (I always like would-be writers of silly Gothics), and the friendship between the two of them, and the cheerfully non-evil stepmother and half-sisters. Overall it was a nice soothing Regency brain-bath, as it was designed to be, and my only actual quibble is the fact that I don't think we really needed to have That Mean Girl From High School -- who is sort of a stock Sherwood Smith character, and if we're going to have her I always want at least a little sympathy and development for her, and this is not the book for that.
