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Mar. 12th, 2021 04:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe Fortune Hunters is very far from the weirdest Joan Aiken gothic I've read, but that doesn't mean it's not at all weird.
Our Heroine Annette has had a rough year: she lost her beloved father, picked up a lingering illness, and got dumped by her fiance, all in relatively short order. Also she's inherited an unrelated huge amount of money, which is in fact a giant additional stress factor! All this has left her with a lot of post-illness complications, including intermittent convenient Gothic amnesia.
Fortunately or unfortunately, her work friend Joanna has helped her spend some of that money by fixing up a nice house in the countryside for an extended rest period while Joanna takes over Annette's responsibilities at her job. In the first chapter, we learn that Annette is theoretically grateful but also finds Joanna an extremely exhausting person and is deeply worried that Joanna will be a bad boss to Annette's direct reports, in intensely specific and relatable ways that meant that I too spent the whole book extremely worried about Annette's direct reports.
Joanna also introduces Annette to her local Famous Painter cousin, who promptly gets very intense about Mentoring Annette In Art. This, it transpires, is Bachelor A. Bachelor B is a visiting archaeologist from New Zealand who is actually in town on the Secret Mission of investigating Bachelor A, who was very intensely Mentoring Bachelor B's Baby Brother In Art before the baby brother committed suicide in mysterious circumstances.
There is also a sinister house next door that houses two sinister women, one of whom is an Unreasoning Attic Madwoman in the classically ablist Gothic style and indeed attempts to strangle Annette in the very first chapter. However, the increasingly amnesiac Annette immediately forgets this event, and the two sinister women next door are very confused when Annette continues to show up throughout the book making polite attempts to be neighborly.
Everything builds to a head when someone turns up murdered, and Annette has been so intermittently amnesiac that she starts to worry that she herself committed the crime!
In the end, it turns out
- the famous painter cousin has history of hypnotizing other painters into compliance and memory loss so that he can seduce them and plagiarize their art (it's not explicitly stated that the seduction part happened to Bachelor B's brother but, like, one can assume)
- as a result, introducing Annette to famous painter cousin so that he can hypnotize her, seduce her and plagiarize her art was all part of an elaborate plot established by Evil Work Friend Joanna so that Annette would be too hypnotized to worry about what's going at work and Joanna can bully all her employees into leaving and rebuild her department from the ground up .... the long con! as a Gothic motivator this is actually extremely funny, more office politics Gothics please
- the sinister ladies next door were, respectively, famous painter cousin's abandoned first wife and daughter
- the daughter is the Attic Madwoman and her mother has spent her entire life training her to throttle her father on command if she ever gets a chance to meet him; the attempted throttling of Annette was merely an unfortunate misunderstanding
- however, evil painter murders them both (along with cousin Joanna, in a breach between partners in crime) and sets their house on fire before His Crimes Are Revealed :(((
- Annette, freed from hypnosis, goes away to New Zealand for a long rest cure with Bachelor B
- we never get closure on what happened with the direct reports whose work lives Joanna ruined and I'm still very concerned :(((
Our Heroine Annette has had a rough year: she lost her beloved father, picked up a lingering illness, and got dumped by her fiance, all in relatively short order. Also she's inherited an unrelated huge amount of money, which is in fact a giant additional stress factor! All this has left her with a lot of post-illness complications, including intermittent convenient Gothic amnesia.
Fortunately or unfortunately, her work friend Joanna has helped her spend some of that money by fixing up a nice house in the countryside for an extended rest period while Joanna takes over Annette's responsibilities at her job. In the first chapter, we learn that Annette is theoretically grateful but also finds Joanna an extremely exhausting person and is deeply worried that Joanna will be a bad boss to Annette's direct reports, in intensely specific and relatable ways that meant that I too spent the whole book extremely worried about Annette's direct reports.
Joanna also introduces Annette to her local Famous Painter cousin, who promptly gets very intense about Mentoring Annette In Art. This, it transpires, is Bachelor A. Bachelor B is a visiting archaeologist from New Zealand who is actually in town on the Secret Mission of investigating Bachelor A, who was very intensely Mentoring Bachelor B's Baby Brother In Art before the baby brother committed suicide in mysterious circumstances.
There is also a sinister house next door that houses two sinister women, one of whom is an Unreasoning Attic Madwoman in the classically ablist Gothic style and indeed attempts to strangle Annette in the very first chapter. However, the increasingly amnesiac Annette immediately forgets this event, and the two sinister women next door are very confused when Annette continues to show up throughout the book making polite attempts to be neighborly.
Everything builds to a head when someone turns up murdered, and Annette has been so intermittently amnesiac that she starts to worry that she herself committed the crime!
In the end, it turns out
- the famous painter cousin has history of hypnotizing other painters into compliance and memory loss so that he can seduce them and plagiarize their art (it's not explicitly stated that the seduction part happened to Bachelor B's brother but, like, one can assume)
- as a result, introducing Annette to famous painter cousin so that he can hypnotize her, seduce her and plagiarize her art was all part of an elaborate plot established by Evil Work Friend Joanna so that Annette would be too hypnotized to worry about what's going at work and Joanna can bully all her employees into leaving and rebuild her department from the ground up .... the long con! as a Gothic motivator this is actually extremely funny, more office politics Gothics please
- the sinister ladies next door were, respectively, famous painter cousin's abandoned first wife and daughter
- the daughter is the Attic Madwoman and her mother has spent her entire life training her to throttle her father on command if she ever gets a chance to meet him; the attempted throttling of Annette was merely an unfortunate misunderstanding
- however, evil painter murders them both (along with cousin Joanna, in a breach between partners in crime) and sets their house on fire before His Crimes Are Revealed :(((
- Annette, freed from hypnosis, goes away to New Zealand for a long rest cure with Bachelor B
- we never get closure on what happened with the direct reports whose work lives Joanna ruined and I'm still very concerned :(((
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Date: 2021-03-13 04:50 am (UTC)