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Dark Triumph by Robin LaFevers

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So, you all know that I loved Grave Mercy. A lot. It was so fun and exciting and well-written and romantic and basically everything I wanted in a book at that moment. Its sequel, Dark Triumph, is no different. If anything, I enjoyed it more.

Where Grave Mercy focused on Ismae, Dark Triumph focuses on Sybella, another assassin nun who’s been sent on an assignment to the home of D’Albret, the sinister noble who conspired to kill Anne, the Duchess of Brittany, after she refused his offer of marriage. At the end of Grave Mercy, it’s Sybella’s warning that saves Anne’s life. But her mission at D’Albret’s home is not over.

Being sent to infiltrate D’Albret’s home as a spy is horrifying enough (D’Albret is a special kind of evil), but for Sybella, it’s torture. You see, soon into the story we learn that she is, in fact, D’Albret’s daughter, and she’s been privy to his violent proclivities since childhood. He’s had at least half a dozen wives, and they all met untimely ends when they ceased to please him. If D’Albret were to find out that she was fathered by Mortain, then she would no longer be off-limits to him.

Sybella has been biding her time, watching D’Albret constantly, hoping to see the marque on him that would give her permission to kill him. Before she is able to see anything, she’s given her official assignment: rescue an ally of the duchess who’s been imprisoned in D’Albret’s dungeon. That her mission is a rescue one, not a killing one, doesn’t sit well with Sybella, who truly enjoys killing (this is something I love about her character). But the man she rescues interests her, and he throws her off-kilter by liking her even more when he learns what she is.

Ever since I was introduced to Sybella in the convent in Grave Mercy, I wanted to know her story. She was presented as quite unhinged initially, but able to heal slowly thanks to the friendships she eventually developed with Ismae and Annith. Having D’Albret as a father explains much of her psyche, and LaFevers writes her so well that I really felt Sybella’s horror at being forced to live once more with the man who killed her mother and made her life a living hell.

A little of the mythology behind Mortain and his marques was revealed in Grave Mercy, and it’s built upon here – and if you’ve read Grave Mercy, you won’t be surprised to learn that the convent doesn’t have it exactly right. A lot of the story involves Sybella grappling with what it means to be sired by Mortain, what it means to be a killer and not only be good at it, but enjoy it. I mentioned in my review of Grave Mercy that I loved that LaFevers made Ismae do the “bad thing” – killing people on order with little thought to the reason behind it. Here, she takes it a step further – Sybella not only does the “bad thing,” she relishes it.

While I loved Ismae as a character, I’m much more intrigued by Sybella. Her sanity is a bit fragile, and she’s sad and angry and overwhelmingly depressed, betrayed over and over by the people who should have loved her. She’s had it rough, but she’s still fighting to find a way to be happy. She’s fascinating and I loved reading about her.

The other things that distinguished Grave Mercy are here, too: political intrigue, action, murder, romance, secrets, bad people who turn out to be good, good people who turn out to be bad. It advances the overall storyline involving Duchess Anne and also creates some intriguing possibilities for the future of the convent and its assassin nuns. It’s just completely well-done, a worthy sequel (or “companion book,” if you like), and will more than satisfy fans of the first. I can’t wait for the third.

Review copy received from the publisher (via Kelly). Dark Triumph will be available April 2.

Nobody’s Secret by Michaela MacColl

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I thought Michaela MacColl’s debut book, Prisoners in the Palace, was a great read. I loved learning about the young Queen Victoria, and the palace intrigue she concocted (based on true events!) was fascinating and fun.
MacColl takes a bit of a different tack with Nobody’s Secret, though it’s still historical YA. This time, her protagonist is Emily Dickinson, and her setting is Amherst, Massachusetts. Fifteen year old Emily is laying out in the field by her home, trying to coax a bee to land on her nose, when she notices that she’s being observed by a young man. They strike up a conversation (a bit of a flirtation, really), but he leaves before she can learn his true name. Instead, she knows him simply as Mr. Nobody, as he introduced himself to her.
This is a terrific meet-cute, but if you’ve read the back cover, you know this is no romantic comedy. Not long after Emily’s meeting with Mr. Nobody, he’s found dead, face-down in a pond on the Dickinson property. The constable and the coroner and everyone else officially involved with the investigation all want to write it off as an accidental drowning, but Emily knows something is off. She’s determined to learn the truth and get justice for her friend.
Famous historical figures solving crimes are all the rage in the adult fiction world, and have been for a while. I don’t know of as many in the YA world, but I admit I do rather like the gimmick, particularly if the person in question is one that already interests me. Emily Dickinson, though, has never held barrels of fascination for me. The poets I like are few and far between, and Miss Dickinson is not one of them. Still, I always enjoy a good historical mystery, particularly when it’s headed by an independent young teenager.
Alas, the mystery itself is not a terribly good one. It’s pretty pedestrian, actually, with a rather small roster of suspects and zero red herrings (meaning there’s no real chance for the reader to guess wrong). So as a whodunnit, it’s not particularly satisfying. As a character study, though, it’s more successful. Through MacColl’s story, we learn about Emily’s life: she was consumptive, she hated doing the baking and washing (which took ages), her mother was frugal to a fault, she had a fascination with bees, and so on. As she is mostly known for two things – her poetry and her seclusion – all these details are a welcome insight into her character. 
As to the central conceit – Emily Dickinson as amateur sleuth – it makes sense that Emily would be one to investigate a murder that everyone else considered closed, given her reputation for oddness.
If you’re looking for a good mystery, I’d probably give this a pass, but for readers interested in Emily Dickinson and her poetry, this would certainly be of interest. Each chapter is titled with a couple lines of her poems, and the way MacColl threads the “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” poem throughout the novel – title included – is clever. For many, Dickinson’s poetry is accessible and understandable where others’ is dense and confusing, so I can certainly see this circulating among her fans.
Review copy received from the publisher. Nobody’s Secret will be available March 1.

Review and Giveaway: Changeling by Philippa Gregory

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So, Philippa Gregory is writing a YA series, and this is the first installment. It is not great. It is not good, either. Even “mediocre” would be an undeserved compliment, because this book failed so hard to live up to my expectations (which were not high to begin with), that I’m a little miffed. And it’s not even a so-bad-it’s-good book, which would have redeemed it in some way. It’s just pretty bad. And that is a sad thing.
Changeling is the first book in the Order of Darkness series, and both of those titles would lead you to believe that this is a much more exciting book than it is. It’s set in 15th century Italy and features teenagers Luca, a boy tasked with investigating strange goings-on at an abbey (like stigmata!), and Isolde, the Lady Abbess who may be at the center of said goings-on.
This premise could have been so good, but instead it’s boring. The solution to the mystery is telegraphed right from the beginning and will come as a surprise to no one. (It’s sad that it does come as a surprise to the characters.) The dialogue is repetitive, the sentence structure is simplistic, and the “clues” Gregory drops are more like anvils. And then after Luca wraps up the mystery at the abbey, the book goes on pointlessly for another 100 pages, featuring an investigation into a supposed werewolf in another town. This mystery, while blessedly shorter, is even more obvious, and I really don’t know why it was included, unless there was a page count goal. It felt very much like a bad monster-of-the-week episode of a bad tv show.
And then there are the characters. Luca and Isolde are bland, Luca especially. They have hopes and fears, but we’re told about them, not shown. Neither have much personality. The ancillary characters are stock: Luca’s sidekick is the fool who is wiser than he appears, and Isolde’s maid is the exoticized, dark-skinned foreigner with dangerous knowledge from afar. 
All of these factors show that Gregory feels like she needs to write down for her audience, which is a rookie mistake, and an unforgivable one. The characters have no nuance, the writing itself is lazy and unimaginative, the mystery is ridiculously thin, and the romance she tries to foist on her readers near the end is so unbelievable (seeing as her two leads have no personality to speak of), it’s insulting.
I say all this having read and greatly enjoyed The Other Boleyn Girl, which was soapy and fun and fascinating, even though I knew Anne was going to lose her head at the end of it. I compare that to this travesty, which for all its faults could have been made enjoyable if only one aspect of the book (writing or character or plot or setting or something) were engaging. None of it was.
Naturally, then, I have two paperback copies to give away, courtesy of Big Honcho Media! I encourage you to enter, even though I clearly didn’t enjoy the book, because hey, you might like it. Fill out the quick form below for a chance to win. Then you can commiserate with me or tell me just how wrong I am.

Cinders and Sapphires by Leila Rasheed

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It’s 1910, and the aristocratic Averleys have just returned to England from many years in India, fleeing scandal. They’ve come home to magnificent Somerton, their ancestral estate, bringing with them a new set of family members, thanks to Lord Averley’s sudden marriage. The arrival of not one, but TWO families has thrown the house’s servants into a tizzy, too, and the whole place is rife with gossip about what happened in India, what the grown-up children will look like, and whether the new additions to the Averley family will be cruel or kind.
Cinders and Sapphires touches on at least a dozen characters, but its main focal points are teenagers Lady Ada Averley, the aristocratic daughter about to make her society debut, and Rose Cliffe, her freshly-promoted lady’s maid with muddy parentage. Ada wants to go to Oxford and get an education, but her family expects her to marry well (meaning rich) instead. Rose is thrilled with her new position, but she dreams of more, even while worried that such dreams may make it look like she’s putting on airs.
The perspectives shift from character to character, the omniscient narrator giving us a little voyeuristic peek into nearly everyone on the page. The comparison to Downton Abbey is apt. It’s wonderfully soapy with a large cast of characters who all have a huge number of problems, making for some terrific melodrama. Great literature this is not, but it is certainly great fun, with terrific plotting and characters who have some interesting personality quirks.
Many of the plot twists are easy to see coming, but some aren’t, and even those telegraphed from a mile away are seriously fun to read. A fun game to play as you read is to think of everything that was majorly scandalous in 1910 and only minorly scandalous now (if at all), and see how many of those things you end up reading about in the pages of Cinders and Sapphires.
This is prime entertainment. There’s romance, intrigue, scandal, betrayal, secrets, shattered dreams – all the good stuff. There are also some fine historical details that ground the novel a bit and give the reader some idea of the relationship between Britain and India at this point in time. This is very accessible historical fiction, the kind that delivers a relatable story without being too anachronistic about it. I turned the last page and wished I had the sequel.
Review copy provided by the publisher. Cinders and Sapphires is available now.

Passion Blue by Victoria Strauss

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It’s the fifteenth century, and seventeen year old Guilia is the illegitimate daughter of a count and his mistress, a seamstress in his household. She’s reviled by the count’s wife, so when the count dies, his widow decides to finally send Guilia away – to a convent to become a nun.
This is the last thing Guilia wants, since she regards the convent as a prison, but there’s nothing she can do to stop from going. She has no money of her own and no other family to take her in. Before she goes, she pays a visit to an astrologer/sorcerer and hires him to make her an amulet, trapping a “spirit” inside of it that is supposed to eventually grant her her heart’s desire. In Guilia’s mind, a husband will free her of the convent, give her a home of her own, and allow her to live a life of her own choosing.
At the convent, the nuns discover that Guilia has a talent for art, and she’s taken in to learn how to paint by a master painter, Maestra Humilita. The Maestra runs an entire painting workshop of just women in the convent, something that would be impossible outside its walls. The workshop is so well-regarded that private citizens as well as churches have commissioned paintings from them.
But Guilia still has marriage and escape from the convent on her mind, and she believes the spirit has granted her heart’s desire when she meets Ormanno, a young man who has been hired to repair a fresco in the convent. As she grows closer to Ormanno, she also grows closer to Humilita, and she learns that no matter what decision she makes, it will entail great sacrifice. (Indeed, women’s roles in this time period were so incredibly limited that anything less than great sacrifice for someone who wanted any measure of independence would have rung false.)
If you were to judge Passion Blue by its author blurbs, you’d think it was historical fantasy, but you’d be mostly wrong. Granted, there’s talk of a sorcerer and astrology and spirits, but it’s all within the context of Guilia’s belief set rather than what actually happens. For those sharp readers, there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it incident near the end of the novel that one could argue is proof of some sort of magic, but really, this novel isn’t going to appeal to those in search of their latest fantasy fix. It’s solidly for historical fiction fans.
Which is a good thing. The historical details are rich and very satisfying. I loved reading about the Renaissance techniques of creating color, of the labor that goes into preparing all of the equipment before the painter could even begin painting. I especially enjoyed reading about how intricate the color recipes were, and that they were so valuable they were written in code and kept in secret books that no one but the creator could read.
I also enjoyed reading about a way a woman in Renaissance Italy could make a life for herself that didn’t involve marriage and babies. The society of the convent is particularly interesting – the women all came to be nuns for a variety of reasons, and many of those reasons had nothing to do with religion. In some ways, the convent was a way for a group of women to function mostly independently, despite the many strict rules they had to follow.
Guilia is, perhaps, not the most perceptive of protagonists. She’s quite naive and is incapable of reading others accurately, which drives much of the conflict of the novel. She learns, though, and eventually comes to realize what readers had picked up on long before she had: her heart’s desire is not what she thought at all. It takes a huge mistake for her to come to this realization, but in the end, we’re left with a young woman who has carved out her own niche in the world.
The writing is lovely. Guilia herself seems quite young (in terms of maturity), but the writing is not juvenile. Strauss keeps the story moving at a nice clip and does a fine job interweaving Guilia’s relentless search for her heart’s desire with the historical backdrop. In less capable hands, the story may have seemed a bit slow or quiet, but I was never bored.
This is a great pick for historical fiction fans, particularly those interested in the Renaissance, women’s roles, or art. It’s also a nice change from historical fiction that re-imagines a well-known historical figure’s life. Those stories are certainly fun to read, but it can take a bit of the mystery out of the tale, since the end is a foregone conclusion.
Review copy received from the publisher/author. Passion Blue is available now.