skygiants | (no subject)

Over the past few months, I've been steadily reading my way through Joanna Bourne's romance novels every time I had to go on a trip, and now I have read them all!

The series takes place at various points in time over the Napoleonic Wars, and generally features a romance between a male English spy and a female French spy [or equivalent], with a few variations on the theme. The central organization is a British spy service that is, we are very clear to specify, nicer and wittier and wildly more competent than the other British spy service, who often show up as minor antagonists; our spy service is very Cosmpolitan and therefore of course generally willing to embrace the rogue French spies that their service members inevitably end up romancing.

There are six books overall; it takes around three books for Joanna Bourne to figure out that it's OK to make her heroines just as grizzled and murderous as her heroes, but the last three books make up for that IN SPADES.

The Spymaster's Lady: The book that sets the pattern for the series, in which French spy Annique teams up with English spy Grey to escape a dicey situation, and then gets capturedy bhim, and then has to decide whether to betray CRUCIAL INFORMATION in order to KEEP THEIR NATIONS FROM WAR. This one has some hilarious dramatic plot twists including the fact that Annique is SECRETLY BLIND, and then gets her sight back and DOESN'T RECOGNIZE THE HERO because he's SPEAKING A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE so he captures her all OVER again; I laughed straight through all of this and Annique is a delight, but Grey is one of Bourne's less interesting heroes and I'm not sure it ever counts as 'consent' when one party is literally being held captive in the other party's basement dungeon. I suspect Bourne agrees with me about Grey, because he's the only one of our spy club who barely even makes a cameo in any other book.

My Lord and Spymaster: I don't understand the title of this book at all because neither of the protagonists are actually spies? SOMEONE is a French spy, and she thinks he is, and he thinks her dad is, and also she's a genius accountant former thief with temporary ... amnesia .....? This book is not very memorable, but is also conveniently pretty divorced from the major mythology of the series, and thus quite skippable.

The Forbidden Rose: This is the first book in the series that I was pretty much completely here for: he's a big cheerful English spy, and she's the Scarlet Pimpernel. (Her name is Marguerite, it's not subtle.) Initially he's trying to capture her for reasons I forget (her dad is an inventor with some kind of MacGuffin?) but then he gives up on that and instead she ends up using her network to rescue him from the Bastille. Includes a good bit of French revolution nonsense but overall very enjoyable & also includes the first meeting of Preteen Spies Hawker and Justine who will be the protagonists of the next and probably best book.

The Black Hawk: Hawker is a show-stealer throughout the entire series, a street thief-turned-spy who spends the first three books befriending the heroines and judging the heroes for hitting on them in situations where the power dynamics are wonky. His romance spans THIRTY YEARS of star-crossed spy vs. spy shenanigans; he and Justine both end up in high positions in their respective spy networks, and don't actually get together together until they're both middle-aged and Justine has retired with full honors to run a mapmaking shop. EXTREMELY QUALITY CONTENT. At one point she shoots him!

Rogue Spy: This is ALSO some very good high-drama content -- the hero and the heroine were TRAINED TOGETHER AS CHILDREN in a SECRET EVIL ACADEMY to create DEADLY DEEP-COVER FRENCH AGENTS (a plot point set up in The Black Hawk), and have both since flipped loyalties to their fake English coworkers/fake English family, but! how are they supposed to know whether the other one has flipped loyalties! WHO TO TRUST! Bonus points for virgin hero and experienced heroine, double bonus points for codebreaker aunties who are secretly very proud of their fake niece's murder skills, triple bonus points for replacing the more standard 'orphan child is secret aristocracy' with a 10x more hilarious 'orphan child is SECRET MOB ROYALTY.' (Minus points for the heroine's relationship and reconciliation with her fake family being mostly offscreened in the second half of the book because it gets completely overwhelmed by other plot drama.)

Beauty Like the Night: the heroine of this one is the sister of the heroine in The Black Hawk and the adopted daughter of the protags of The Forbidden Rose and, after a bloody stint spying during the Peninsular Wars for the other intelligence agency that's not embarrassingly full of her dad's friends, has settled down to start a career as Sherlock Holmes. The hero is a French/Spanish wine-maker and thief who's looking for his murdered estranged wife's missing illegitimate daughter. There is QUITE A LOT of plot in this one and I'm pretty sure that the heroine's history of open military service followed by nearly-seamless reintegration into the nineteenth-century ton while simultaneously kicking off a consulting detective career doesn't make a lot of sense ... but honestly, I don't care, it's super enjoyable nonsense and we left realism behind about three 'sure, marry your French spy nemesis!' volumes back. Not as coherent as the Forbidden Rose/Black Hawk/Rogue Spy trilogy but a fun coda nonetheless.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

kore

Oh, that embedded trilogy sounds neat.

From:

sovay

but honestly, I don't care, it's super enjoyable nonsense and we left realism behind about three 'sure, marry your French spy nemesis!' volumes back.

This is reminding me of the time I read Sir Percy Hits Back (1927), which is the Scarlet Pimpernel novel about Chauvelin's secret daughter who doesn't know what her father does for a living and accidentally gets caught up in a counterrevolutionary plot and in all the guilt-by-association paranoia of the Terror her father can't move to save her without condemning them both, so he's forced to strike a deal with his hated arch-enemy, which Sir Percy finds hilarious and Chauvelin really does not, and generally I got out of that book feeling I had slightly drowned in the Baroness Orczy's id, which did not stop it from being fun.

The Black Hawk sounds delightful.

From:

musesfool

I enjoyed The Spymaster's Lady but didn't realize it was a series! I will definitely check out those last four.

From:

whimsyful

he's a big cheerful English spy, and she's the Scarlet Pimpernel

Sold! I actually have The Forbidden Rose on my ereader, and now I'm going to start that immediately.

From:

(no subject)

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