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Mar. 27th, 2016 07:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsMore YA regency fluff! Although, to be fair, Patrice Kindl's Keeping the Castle is rather less fluffy and more straight-up satirical. (Though sadly lacking in cross-dressing.)
Althea Crawley is a girl in a world in which her only job is to marry rich, because the castle in which she and her impoverished family live is straight-up falling apart and they also have no money with which to fix it, or to buy themselves food. On the first page, Althea accidentally scares away a suitor by lovingly remarking 'you are so rich' right after he's popped the question. Afterwards, various local gentry descending upon Althea's house for tea and gossip about the eligible young men coming to the neighborhood, while Althea tries desperately to find enough food to feed them all by dividing the biscuits into ever-smaller pieces and dredging the channel for small fish. This gives you about a sense of the tone the book is taking. Subtle it ain't, but it's often quite funny.
Enter handsome, presumably wealthy Lord Boring (....yes) and his bad-tempered, bad-mannered, lowborn & presumably impoverished cousin Frederick, and we all know where this is going.
It's kind of interesting to read this book so soon after Newt's Emerald, because Garth Nix is definitely writing In The Vein Of Heyer while Patrice Kindl is clearly aiming for The Vein Of Austen. In the Vein of Heyer, society is a delightful place; deserving people will do all right, and undeserving people will get their comeuppance, because the world is generally fine. In the Vein of Austen, the world is ridiculous at best and cruel at worst, and plenty of undeserving people will be far happier than they deserve to be and plenty of reasonably deserving people will settle for pragmatic misery, but at least our protagonists won't have to go it alone.
Althea Crawley is a girl in a world in which her only job is to marry rich, because the castle in which she and her impoverished family live is straight-up falling apart and they also have no money with which to fix it, or to buy themselves food. On the first page, Althea accidentally scares away a suitor by lovingly remarking 'you are so rich' right after he's popped the question. Afterwards, various local gentry descending upon Althea's house for tea and gossip about the eligible young men coming to the neighborhood, while Althea tries desperately to find enough food to feed them all by dividing the biscuits into ever-smaller pieces and dredging the channel for small fish. This gives you about a sense of the tone the book is taking. Subtle it ain't, but it's often quite funny.
Enter handsome, presumably wealthy Lord Boring (....yes) and his bad-tempered, bad-mannered, lowborn & presumably impoverished cousin Frederick, and we all know where this is going.
It's kind of interesting to read this book so soon after Newt's Emerald, because Garth Nix is definitely writing In The Vein Of Heyer while Patrice Kindl is clearly aiming for The Vein Of Austen. In the Vein of Heyer, society is a delightful place; deserving people will do all right, and undeserving people will get their comeuppance, because the world is generally fine. In the Vein of Austen, the world is ridiculous at best and cruel at worst, and plenty of undeserving people will be far happier than they deserve to be and plenty of reasonably deserving people will settle for pragmatic misery, but at least our protagonists won't have to go it alone.
