(no subject)

[skygiants]

Frantic 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.

Comments

[celestinenox]

It sounds awful. (Then again romance isn't my thing to begin with.) (But I can read it if at least something happens.) (It really sounds like nothing happens here.)

[skygiants]

Something SHOULD have happened! The plot and premise were about things happening! If only anyone was actually competent. :(

[thistleingrey]

What's your field, out of curiosity? (Skip or vague-ify as desired, obviously.) And good luck with the thesis-writing!

[skygiants]

Thank you! :) I'm in a program for moving image archiving, which is basically a currently-little-populated spinoff of library science/archival studies.

[thistleingrey]

Neat. And good--someone ought to be working on that. :)

[batyatoon]

So hey only tangentially related: I read Diana Wynne Jones's A Sudden Wild Magic, and I cannot remember if it is one of the books you have previously reviewed or not?

[skygiants]

I've never reviewed it on here! To be honest, although I've read it, I don't remember it all that well -- it's one of the (very few!) books of hers that didn't particularly thrill me, and I never had an urge to reread it after the first time. (Which, interestingly, she has some stuff to say about in Reflections, about how much more stifled she felt writing a "for-adults" book than she did her for-kids books, which might be part of it.)

What did you think?

[batyatoon]

I ... weirdly kind of enjoyed it despite actually liking almost none of the characters? And also despite the off-puttingly gendered way in which I found the various characters to be unlikeable?

[skygiants]

I always find gender stuff really fascinating with DWJ in general -- like, so much of her life and her writing was about fighting her internalized idea of gender stereotypes (see: Aunt Maria), and she doesn't always succeed! And when she doesn't, it makes me sad, but not about her so much as for her, if that makes sense.