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Feb. 25th, 2013 03:25 pmFrantic thesis-writing apparently puts me in the mood for sweet inoffensive Regency fluff, so when I saw Bewitching Season on super-super-discount sale at Books of Wonder, I was like, "great, magical late-Regency hijinks about sisters rescuing their governess, just what I wanted!"
ALAS, Bewitching Season was not, in fact, just what I wanted.
First of all, the premise does not make a ton of sense -- it's basically just the normal Regency with magic, except nobody knows magic exists, except the protagonists and their little brother and their governess and . . . a bunch of other people . . . I guess . . .? It's SORT OF UNCLEAR. I did not even realize that our heroine's parents didn't know she was casting spells until like halfway through the book. Worldbuilding: it's relevant!
Anyway, our heroine and her twin sister are off in London for their first season when their governess gets kidnapped for magical conspiracy reasons. "WE MUST RESCUE HER!" they cry.
. . . our heroine then proceeds to do essentially nothing for the rest of the book.
Well, no, I lie! She does do some things:
- get a crush on a boooooy
- then jump to a whole lot of conclusions about how he a.) has a crush on her identical twin sister (he doesn't) and b.) will hate her forever if he finds out she has magic because she heard a rumor that he heard a rumor his mother was killed by a witch (she wasn't, and he doesn't, and she never actually brings this up with him in any way AT ALL)
- then cast a LOVE SPELL on the boy
- then spend the rest of the book having a belated moral crisis about it . . .? Which mostly seems to consist of nobly going around thinking, "well, if I just don't talk to him ever again, HE'LL GET OVER IT AND IT'LL BE FINE"
And in the middle of this every so often she'll think, oh, gosh, my governess is still in danger! I should really do something about that! And then she'll go back to angsting and pining and nobly pushing away both her besotted suitor and her twin sister for their mutual own good and sort of forget all about the actual kidnapped-governess plot. And then eventually she gets the brilliant idea to . . . run away and ALSO become a governess . . .? Because this will certainly help the situation in all ways!
Meanwhile, the governess is having a Stockholm Syndrome romance with the sad hot Irish magician who was cruelly blackmailed into kidnapping her because -- as far as I could tell -- if he didn't do it, the villain was going to tell his poor sick father that his older brother wronged a lady one time and it learning this would BREAK HIS FATHER'S HEART.
So obviously the way to fix this is to wrong more ladies! But he's real tortured about it so all is forgiven, basically.
I don't know, man. There was some stuff I liked! The little brother was cute. And I did deeply enjoy the fact that the twins had an ENORMOUS FANGIRL CRUSH on Princess Victoria, that was pretty adorable. But I spent most of the book too deeply, deeply frustrated with the heroine to really enjoy most of it regardless.
ALAS, Bewitching Season was not, in fact, just what I wanted.
First of all, the premise does not make a ton of sense -- it's basically just the normal Regency with magic, except nobody knows magic exists, except the protagonists and their little brother and their governess and . . . a bunch of other people . . . I guess . . .? It's SORT OF UNCLEAR. I did not even realize that our heroine's parents didn't know she was casting spells until like halfway through the book. Worldbuilding: it's relevant!
Anyway, our heroine and her twin sister are off in London for their first season when their governess gets kidnapped for magical conspiracy reasons. "WE MUST RESCUE HER!" they cry.
. . . our heroine then proceeds to do essentially nothing for the rest of the book.
Well, no, I lie! She does do some things:
- get a crush on a boooooy
- then jump to a whole lot of conclusions about how he a.) has a crush on her identical twin sister (he doesn't) and b.) will hate her forever if he finds out she has magic because she heard a rumor that he heard a rumor his mother was killed by a witch (she wasn't, and he doesn't, and she never actually brings this up with him in any way AT ALL)
- then cast a LOVE SPELL on the boy
- then spend the rest of the book having a belated moral crisis about it . . .? Which mostly seems to consist of nobly going around thinking, "well, if I just don't talk to him ever again, HE'LL GET OVER IT AND IT'LL BE FINE"
And in the middle of this every so often she'll think, oh, gosh, my governess is still in danger! I should really do something about that! And then she'll go back to angsting and pining and nobly pushing away both her besotted suitor and her twin sister for their mutual own good and sort of forget all about the actual kidnapped-governess plot. And then eventually she gets the brilliant idea to . . . run away and ALSO become a governess . . .? Because this will certainly help the situation in all ways!
Meanwhile, the governess is having a Stockholm Syndrome romance with the sad hot Irish magician who was cruelly blackmailed into kidnapping her because -- as far as I could tell -- if he didn't do it, the villain was going to tell his poor sick father that his older brother wronged a lady one time and it learning this would BREAK HIS FATHER'S HEART.
So obviously the way to fix this is to wrong more ladies! But he's real tortured about it so all is forgiven, basically.
I don't know, man. There was some stuff I liked! The little brother was cute. And I did deeply enjoy the fact that the twins had an ENORMOUS FANGIRL CRUSH on Princess Victoria, that was pretty adorable. But I spent most of the book too deeply, deeply frustrated with the heroine to really enjoy most of it regardless.
