The Third Nero, Lindsey Davis

5 stars

First Sentence: Many people wanted to believe the Emperor Nero had never died.

Thoughts: It’s the day after Tiberius and Albia’s wedding and the honeymoon is canceled. Not surprising, since the groom was truck by lightning during the procession to his new home with his wife. There’s no telling when or if he’ll recover so Albia is worried about money. They only have a couple of rooms in their new house finished, the business needs taking care of, and there are bills. Enter Philippus, the son of the late Claudius Laeta.

Like his father, Philippus works for the emperor. Also like his father, he works for imperial intelligence. The reason why he’s making the post-wedding call is not just for congratulations, but to ask Albia to take care of a job for him that requires a woman’s touch. Two provincial governors were—ahem–encouraged to depart this life for the next one recently, and Philippus needs to know what their wives knew about the activities that led to their unscheduled departures. Albia’s not happy about working for the government after all Falco went through, but she needs money and Philippus will pay up front.

Albia goes to the palace to interviews the wives of the late governors of Britain and Asia. The British governor’s wife stayed behind in Rome while he was serving his term of office, so she didn’t know much about the events that led to his death. The Asian governor’s wife, though, was with him when he was killed. After speaking with the widow (or, more specifically, the widow’s sister) Albia suspects that the reason the Asian governor was killed was less to do about what he was accused of and more to do with the third Nero imposter that recently popped up in Parthia.

Ever since Nero was killed in 68, imposters have been showing up claiming to be him. Some fools believed that Nero would bring them back to a better time, forgetting all the chaos he had created in the haze of nostalgia.* The Flavian emperors were quick to put these imposters down, usually while they were still out in the provinces, but this latest was brought to Rome. Philippus and Albia go to the jail where the False Nero is being kept. They find a peasant with dyed blond hair who can’t speak Latin calmly eating a bowl of soup. How this guy was going to pass as Nero was beyond them.

The next morning, the false Nero was dead. The secret ingredient in the soup was poison. The jailers hurry to dump the body in a convenient ditch in the suburbs while Trebianus, the imperial Parthia watcher, hires Albia to check on the Parthian ambassador and his retinue. There’s a traitor in the palace and Trebianus suspects that they’re in with the Parthians and, possibly, the latest false Nero.

Albia doesn’t want to go to the Parthian embassy. It used to be the home of Falco’s arch-nemesis Anacrites. Albia had been there a few times and barely got away. But she needs the money, so she gets her cousin Marcia to help her infiltrate the harem (and to see if the Parthians kept Anacrites collection of erotic pottery. They didn’t). They find themselves in more trouble than they expected when they uncover plans for a fourth Nero imposter. This has got to be cleared up before Domitian gets back from Pannonia. He’s expected any day now.

*Laughs in American living in 2026.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. 3: Century, Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill

3.5 stars

First Sentence: Fraters and sorors…beloved fraters and sorors…we are gathered in the profess-house.

Thoughts: And here is where I part ways with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. As someone in the Goodreads reviews put it, the series got a little too “old man yells at cloud.” I read a little bit of the next volume, Tempest, and the grumpiness with Kids These Days was much more prevalent. In my humble opinion, the series should have stayed in Victorian times, but I’m not the author so….

There are three sections in this volume, covering 1909 to 2009. The first section involves the Second Murray League which consisted of Mina Murry, Allan Quartermain pretending to be his own son so no one knew about Ayesha’s pool, Orlando in insufferable Edwardian male form, A.J. Raffles the gentleman thief, and Thomas Carnacki the occultist visionary. Carnacki has a vision that something terrible is going to happen in London involving a Moonchild. Subsequent investigation indicates that it may happen down at the Limehouse docks.

Meanwhile Captain Nemo’s daughter Janni refuses to follow in her father’s footsteps and heads off to London. She gets a job in a dive bar in Limehouse which lasts until the night she’s attacked and raped by a group of sailors. She’s rescued by Jenny from The Threepenny Opera who sings songs from the play while Janni recovers and summons the Nautilus to get revenge on everyone who hurt her. The League gets there only to witness Janni taking over her father’s crew. The moonchild problem is left for the future.

The next chapter is set in the psychedelic days of 1969. Allan, Mina, and Orlando (still male) have been sent back to London from the Blazing World to stop the moonchild. Meanwhile the singer in a popular Britpop band has been murdered. One of his bandmates, the one who was there when the singer was killed, plans a huge memorial concert in the park. The real reason for the concert is so the ghost of Oliver Haddo, who was trying to create the antichrist, can take over his body and start his reign of terror. Mina meets with the Traveler, a mysterious man with glasses and a trenchcoat who’s stuck in location but not in time. He warns Mina of Haddo’s plans so she goes to the concert while Allan and Orlando try to find Haddo’s cult. Mina takes the brown acid and has a bad trip where she fights off Haddo’s spirit while the concert goes downhill. She’s taken away in an ambulance before her men can find her.

A brief interlude in the 1970s reveals that Allan’s gone back to opiates to deal with his guilt. Orlando, in disgust, leaves him to join the army.

Orlando’s military career ends in 2009 when he’s hospitalized after going nuts and shooting up a marketplace in Iraq. Just in time because she’s switched over to female. Prospero appears from the Blazing World to warn Orlando that the moonchild has been born. He sends her to a mental hospital to rescue Mina, who’s been kept there for forty years, and they start the search anew. Then it turns into some kind of twisted Harry Potter story that barely makes sense.

In conclusion, drugs are bad, mmkay? Don’t do drugs.

The Graveyard of the Hesperides, Lindsey Davis

5 stars

First Sentence: Everyone knew a dead barmaid was buried in the courtyard.

Thoughts: Flavia Albia and Tiberius Manlius Faustus are already living together, but because she’s an informer and he’s an aedile, Tiberius wants a formal wedding. Albia’s okay with it as long as she doesn’t have to do too much of the planning. Fortunately (or not) she has two teenage sisters who are more than happy to take over that job for her. Oh boy.

Albia doesn’t have time to plan her wedding because she’s helping Tiberius start up his new career as a builder. He took over Salvidia’s business after he moved out of his uncle’s house. Remember Salvidia? She was Albia’s client who got killed in The Ides of April. Tiberius is finishing up a job Salvidia left unfinished at her death, renovating The Garden of the Hesperides, a dive bar on the Viminal Hill. Unlike most dive bars, this one has a legend associated with it. A barmaid was supposedly murdered and buried in the courtyard about ten years ago. No one really believes it until two of the builders uncover human bones while digging a trench for a water feature in the courtyard.

Work comes to a screeching halt. The vigiles are called in. Two cohorts of vigiles. After some back and forth the entire courtyard is excavated, revealing the remains of several men, a chicken, and the barmaid who’s missing her head for some reason. Albia takes the case of What Happened to Rufia the Barmaid Ten Years Ago and Who Are the Other Men?

No one really wants to talk about it. Eventually Albia is put on the trail of one Menendra, a mysterious business women who travels around with a pair of toughs. Finding out her business is a job in itself as Menendra has her fingers in all the pies on the Viminal. When she catches up to her, Albia learns Menendra learned everything she knows from Rufia back in the day, but she can’t shed any light on what happened to her old mentor.

Then they find out that the female skeleton was pregnant when she was killed. Well she couldn’t be Rufia, because Rufia was well past all that when she vanished. So who in Hades was the murdered woman? And, again, why is her head missing? Could it be the Rabirius gang? They’ve been seen nosing around the various bars in the neighborhood and Albia knows they have a protection racket going.

Meanwhile the wedding draws ever closer. Albia shuts down most of her sisters’ elaborate plans by hiring her own augur and sacrificers (I can’t remember the Latin name). They approve because the men Albia hired are hot, hot, hot. Also, they’ll bring their own sheep. This is important because Uncle Balbius keeps insisting he can do the sacrifices at family holidays. He took a class once, you see. Albia’s precautions don’t stop Balbius from showing up with his own pig which inspires the funniest scene in the book. Ah, family.

A Few Green Leaves, Barbara Pym

3.5 stars

First Sentence: On the Sunday after Easter—Low Sunday, Emma believed it was called—the villagers were permitted to walk in the park and woods surrounding the manor.

Thoughts: I think this is the quietest book I’ve ever read. Some books are a conversation, some are a shout, but this one is a whisper. It’s mainly scenes of English village life in the 1970s. The population is aging, their most important engagement each week is at the doctor’s surgery where they pick up their prescriptions. They go for walks on the manor once a year. They make horrible dinners out of gelatin. And they observe each other, especially Emma Howick, an anthropologist who’s writing a study of village life.

Emma sees Graham Pettifer, an old flame/friend/colleague, on a discussion panel on the telly one night and is inspired to write him a letter catching up. Graham takes Emma’s letter to mean more than it does. He shows up unannounced in the village a couple of times to visit, making a big deal (for an Englishman) about how his marriage is on the rocks. Emma isn’t sure she wants to rekindle things with Graham, but she can’t do anything when he moves in over the summer to work on a book. His attempts to leave his wife are ultimately futile because Emma’s more interested in the vicar, Tom Dagnall.

Tom and his sister Daphne rattle around in the old manse, much to the disgust of Dr. Shrubsole and his wife. The Shrubsoles have three children and Mrs. Dr.’s mother living with them in a tiny box of a house and they would love to have the much larger manse. When Daphne moves in with her friend Heather after Heather retires, they think the vicar will move into a smaller house, but he doesn’t seem to want to up sticks. He’s more interested in tentatively starting things up with Emma.

Daphne, meanwhile, finds out that her dream of living with her best friend isn’t what she hoped. She and Heather had made annual trips to Greece, and Daphne thought they’d retire there. But Heather’s moved into a small house in the suburbs of Birmingham or Manchester, one of those industrial towns, and wants to go to Cornwall for their next holiday. The only thing Daphne likes about her new life is her dog. She hopes to move back to the village with Tom but no one there is interested in having her back.

I’m kind of surprised at how much the characters sucked me in to their stories. I was very invested in the Emma/Tom relationship. Graham got on my nerves with his wishy-washy ways. Charlie Brown popped by at one point to tell him to grow a spine. Daphne might have been interesting if she had enough spine to be the termagant she so desperately wanted to be, but at least she got her longed-for dog.

In short, this is the novel form of the English vs. American movies bit from Suzy Izzard’s Dress to Kill. I need to come up with a term for this genre. Arranging matches, maybe?

Deadly Election, Lindsey Davis

5 stars

First Sentence: Never hold an election in July.

Thoughts: There are some eternal truths in this world, and that first sentence is one of them. July is too hot to do anything in the northern hemisphere except melt slowly into an uncomfortable puddle. But it’s also the month when Domitian is out of town, so if there was any time to have a pretense at democracy it’s now.

July is also not a good time to hold an auction because most people with money have left Rome for the coast, including Albia’s parents. But the Callisti need money now so they cleaned out their warehouse filled with old furniture, knickknacks, paddywhacks, and dog’s bones from their lost home in Pompeii and hired the Didius auction house to sell the less damaged pieces. They expect a good sale; enough time has passed since The Eruption to leave a veneer of allure over Pompeian pieces.

There was no allure to the smelly old chest, though. When the auction house workers opened it up, they quickly closed it and sent for Albia. When she came, she opened the chest to reveal a man’s decaying body inside. She quickly closed it as well and sent the chest to an undertaker she didn’t like. Fundanus may be an officious jerk, but he was good at post-mortems. Unfortunately he couldn’t tell who the man was. The only personal item left with him (besides his clothes) was a plain gold ring like every other equestrian wore.

Meanwhile Faustus found out that Albia came back to town after visiting her parents. He hires her to help his friend Sextus Vibius Marinus who’s running for next year’s plebian aedile. Since Faustus ran the previous year and won, he’s Vibius’ campaign manager. He wants Albia to dig up dirt on the other candidates that they can use in attack speeches. Albia is not impressed with Vibius. Something about him doesn’t sit right with her. Maybe it’s the way his wife is nowhere to be found while the other candidates’ wives are often seen out and about in the Forum with their husbands.

Meanwhile the Callisti auction is going ahead. The smelly chest (now empty of its gruesome contents) sells the first day. Some questioning by the auction workers reveals that the Callisti used a proxy to buy it back. When Albia asks them why, they feed her a line about keeping the notorious chest in the family to protect their reputation. Being Falco’s daughter and an experienced investigator in her own right, she doesn’t believe them. Then the chest comes back up on the block with a different body inside. Oh for cryin’ out….

What is going on with this chest? Who was the first dead man? What is the connection among all the candidates for plebian aedile? Where is Vibius’ wife? And, most importantly, will Albia and Faustus finally succumb to the sexual tension that’s been building between them since the start of the series?

I’ll answer the last question: yes. Yes they do.

The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: Private Revelations from Britain’s Most Famed Diarist, Guy de la Bédoyère

4 stars

First Sentence: The celebrated seventeenth-century English diarist and naval officer Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) has been well served when it comes to biographies and editions of his diary.

Thoughts: Samuel Pepys’ diary is a fascinating look back at the world of 1660s London and the court of King Charles the Spaniel…SECOND. King Charles the Second. It’s famous, and rightly so, for its cast of famous characters from the king and his various mistresses to the Earl of Sandwich to Sir W. Penn (father of the Penn who founded Pennsylvania) and G. Carteret (namesake of Carteret County, NC). The most famous passages are those detailing the Great Fire of London in 1666. But one mystery remaining is what is hidden behind the polyglot Sam used when he was up to no good, an odd mixture of French, Spanish, and Latin, lightly dusted with Greek.

There never has been a good translation of the polyglot. When the diary was first published in the 1800s, such things were not translated because innocent minds might read them and become tainted with Sin. The passages were published as they were written with no attempt an explaining what they actually said. All that was known was that the polyglot showed up when Sam was tomcatting around. But we live in the future now with access to future technology. De la Bédoyère used that technology to make a new transcription of the diary, specifically the dirty bits.

He used digital images of the diary that he could do a proper CSI “zoom-enhance” and with a copy of the shorthand manual Pepys used, made a more correct transcription so he could get the correct words in the polyglot (some of the Spanish was originally incorrectly transcribed as French, the spelling wasn’t always correct in the original which caused more mistakes, that sort of thing.) Then he made a new translation that revealed that ol’ Sammy was a very, VERY bad boy, especially from 1665 to 1668.

Even though he had been married to his wife Elizabeth for over a decade, Sam did not hesitate to trade sex for favors. Specifically having sex with various men’s wives in return for promotions or good jobs with the Navy for the husbands. A lot of people knew Sam had a weakness for pretty women (even in church*) and they used that to their advantage. The most famous example is the Bagwells. Pepys was more than willing to give Mr. Bagwell a good naval job in exchange for the enjoyment of Mrs. Bagwell’s favors, even when she wasn’t willing to give them up. Yes, Sam straight-up raped her a few times because it was the 1660s and he was a man and women didn’t have rights to their own bodies under the law. You know, the good old days.

Sam got so reckless that he eventually got caught as we knew he would. One day in late 1668, Elizabeth caught him with his hand up her maid’s skirt. This led to a huge fight, the maid’s dismissal, and Sam being brought to heel. Even though he did try to chase the maid down when he thought Elizabeth wasn’t paying attention. However, he did realize that he needed to appreciate his wife more (in all senses of the word) and they were reconciling when the diary ended in 1669. Why did it end? Because Sam’s vision was failing. He probably had astigmatism, but reading glasses hadn’t been invented yet so the diary had to end.

As you may suspect, this book is a one-sided look at Pepys because it’s only the dirty bits and Sam’s views on women (and his viewing women). The full diary (linked above) has a more nuanced look at him, but since his affiliation with the Royal Society, his love of music, and his business with the Royal Navy has been thoroughly covered over the last century, it’s not important for de la Bédoyère’s purposes which is to bring the hidden parts to light. So we get the bad side of Samuel Pepys instead of the good. He acknowledges this in the epilogue when he discusses the two sides of Pepys:

Pepys was a bully, a vain and philandering hypocrite, and a domineering and mean-minded husband. He was capable of sexual violence as well as being coercive, deceitful, and manipulative. He groomed his female targets into submission and disregarded their feelings. He was also easily manipulated by others who spotted his inclinations. Some of his conduct was not exceptional for his own time or since but his candid diary ensured that sordid and discomfiting aspects of his private life would be preserved among the record of his other daily activities. Pepys probably also suffered from a behavioural addiction manifested in the compulsive pursuit of subversive extra-marital sex. This also added to his sense of entitlement. Secrecy was part of the thrill.[…]

Samuel Pepys was equally capable of generosity, compassion, and love. His enduring loyalty was one of his most edifying characteristics. He constructed a system of patronage which, despite being muddied by the sexual services he demanded from the wives of some of the men he helped forward, he diligently maintained long afterwards. He was meticulous, exceptionally well-organized, and a superb administrator. He had a form of high intelligence, had an overwhelming of credulous curiosity about life, and a well-developed appreciation of art and music. He was an invigorating individual and was manifestly held in great esteem by many of his contemporaries, which he enthusiastically recorded at every opportunity, though he also made enemies.

All in all, though, I liked the book. I still follow his diary online and I’m still fascinated by his life. Although I wouldn’t let him near me or any woman I know without at least three other people in the room and a can of bear spray in case he got grabby.

*Especially in church.

Fireflies and Chocolate, Ailish Sinclair

4 stars

First Sentence: “Ach, but will you look at that?”

Thoughts: It’s been about 150 years since the Mermaid and the Bear found peace in northern Scotland. Their great-great-however many times great granddaughter Elizabeth Manteith is living in the pink castle with her father, mother, a pair of servants, and her spaniel Prince Charles of All Scotland and Britain and the World. Well, not her father. He’s currently off with the real Prince Charles Hoping to Be of All Scotland and Britain and the World. Her mother is confined to her room doped up on laudanum to deal with the lasting grief of her young son’s death a few years before. So it’s basically just Elizabeth, the servants, and the dog.

Her father hasn’t forgotten her, though. For her upcoming sixteenth birthday he sends her some money to buy a real horse. She, Prince Charles the Dog, and the manservant go to Aberdeen to find a suitable steed. While there, Prince Charles runs off and Elizabeth runs after him. She’s promptly lost. Fortunately a kindly stranger says he saw her dog and leads her to the docks. Unfortunately he’s a slaver who shoves her into a bag and knocks her unconscious as soon as they get to his ship.

She comes to in the hold with a lot of other people going to America to be slaves or “indentured servants.” (Basically slavery with an expiration date.) She makes friends with Peter, the boy she’s chained to, and they support each other through the long, miserable journey. When they reach Pennsylvania, though, they’re separated and sold to different people.

Elizabeth convinces herself that she’s in love with Peter because she’s a hopelessly romantic sixteen-year-old. When she’s bought by an elderly woman named Mrs. Sauer (or “Sour”), she runs away as soon as she gets a chance, hoping to find Peter again. Instead she finds an American Indian woman and an escaped Black woman living on their own in the woods. They introduce her to her new home and introduce her to a nice Quaker man who knows Mrs. Sour. He tells Elizabeth that she was actually bought for the woman’s son Michael who doesn’t believe in slavery. Eventually he convinces her to go back to them.

Michael is an invalid tended by his faithful servant (not slave) Comfort. When Elizabeth gets to his house she finds it’s a proper bachelor’s quarters. She immediately starts cleaning up the kitchen and making an onion tart to supplement the plain bread and cheese the men have been living off of. She finds out that Michael’s main problem is laudanum and helps him get off the junk. As he recovers, he takes more of an interest in the plantation. He discovers that his overseer is a right bastard and gets rid of him. He frees the slaves working in the fields and gives them a stake in the plantation. I didn’t think this novel would be as much of a secret fantasy as its predecessor, but here we are. I ain’t complainin’.

Elizabeth goes to town with Michael where she meets Ben Franklin. She puts in an order with him for some handbills to post that describe Peter and tells him where to find her. Mr. Franklin also helps Elizabeth send some letters back to Scotland to let her family know what happened to her.

This isn’t a fairy tale like the original Manteith tale, but it is a nice coming-of-age tale about a woman suddenly dumped into the New World. While she isn’t part of the troubles in 1740s Scotland (which she learns about from letters from home) she has enough troubles on her own end. But there are wonders as well, like fireflies which I didn’t know were a North American only phenomenon. People in Scotland are used to finding hedgehogs in their gardens so it all evens out.

And in case you’re wondering, Prince Charles the Dog is fine. The manservant found him in Aberdeen and brought him back home. Elizabeth got a new dog in Pennsylvania anyway, and he was a Very Good Boy.

Small Angels, Lauren Owen

3.5 stars

First Sentence: Tell it to the trees.

Thoughts: Most of the people in the village know not to go into Mockbeggar Woods. Chloe doesn’t know why, so she asks the town blabbermouth about it at her hen party. He tells her most of the story of the last Gonne funeral, but he stops before the good part, leaving Chloe still confused but very interested in the woods.

She had come to the village with her fiance Sam to get married. Sam grew up there, but Chloe had only been there once before to meet his parents. She fell in love with the little country church, Saint Somebody and All Angels, aka Small Angels, on that visit. When she found out that it was being renovated as a wedding venue, one of her big decisions was made.

The villagers are happy about the marriage, but they’re nervous about opening Small Angels again. The last event there was the fateful funeral. The Gonnes, who lived near the church, had a lot of rituals to keep the forest quiet, but they’re all dead or gone except the youngest, Lucia, who isn’t keeping up the old traditions. That means the woods are waking up again. Why? They’re haunted by an angry ghost.

Harry Child was born to a “fallen woman” who lived in a cabin in the woods in the early 1800s. He was adopted by the Gonnes and raised as their own son. He and his adopted brother were the best of friends until they had a falling out in their early adulthood. Harry tried to hide in Small Angels from his brother, but he was tricked into coming out where he was torn apart by his brother’s dogs. Ever since then he’s haunted the woods, fenced in only by the Gonne’s rituals.

Two hundred years later, Lucia and her sisters liked to put on plays in the woods. They thought the trees and the spirits liked to hear the stories. Lucia went farther than the others, though, and ended up befriending Harry’s ghost. Everything was fine until she met Sam’s sister Kate and fell in love. Harry didn’t want to share Lucia with anyone, so he started coming out of the woods to cause trouble. It all came to a head at the funeral of Lucia’s grandfather when her sister Elphine was killed.

Now Chloe’s inadvertently stirring things up. She goes for a walk in the woods and accidentally wakes Harry up. This time he’s not only threatening the village, but the wedding. Kate, who’s back in town to be Sam’s best woman, goes to Lucia to see what they can do. And see if their relationship can be repaired, but that’s only a very minor part of the story and feels kind of tacked on so the book can be marketed to the sapphic romance crowd.

Me, I’m here for vengeful ghosts and this book delivers. Eventually. The story kind of drags. I blame Lucia because her life story is interspersed with the modern-day chapters and it goes. on. forever. Yeah, we get it, your grandma didn’t like you and you’re the misunderstood youngest child and a wee lesbian, can we get back to Harry now?

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, John Green

3 stars

First Sentence: Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the Scottish tinkerer and chemist James Watt began working on a new project.

Thoughts: Did you know that poverty levels affect healthcare and that poor people and poor nations have worse healthcare than rich ones do? Because if you didn’t, Green will make sure you do very quickly as he repeats this at least 7,000 times in a 198-page book. You see, I’m not sure if you noticed this, but TB rates in poor countries are worse than in rich ones, and rich companies and well-meaning organizations tend to gatekeep essential medications and treat poor people like idiots because they don’t have money. Did you know that money is the main factor in determining your standard of living? Did you? DID YOU? BETTER SAY YES!

Sorry. I’m sure you can tell that the repetition of basic economic truths got on my last raw, bleeding nerve after the third repetition. I’m sure this book passed by at least one editor on its way to the printing press, but I guess that editor was too busy playing on their phone to notice the page length was padded out by constant restatement.

The focus of the book is divided into two parts: the history of tuberculosis and the case history of Henry, a boy in Sierra Leone that Grene met when he was visiting that country. Henry had a persistent case of antibiotic-resistant TB that kept him in hospitals since he was a young boy. I will let you know how he turns out for two reasons: 1) I got very invested in Henry and had to know before the end if he lived or died and 2), Green is the person who wrote The Fault in Our Stars* and I don’t trust his pen near sick children. Henry’s fine. He beat TB and is now a Youtuber in Sierra Leone. Go Henry.

The history of TB was the most interesting part to me, but it was skimmed over. I would have liked more insight into how the disease affected various cultures, but that would have cut into valuable harping over economic inequities time. I was especially intrigued by how Victorian culture popularized the sickly artist trope, specifically the belief that having TB made one especially creative (see: John Keats). It wasn’t until very recently that people figured out that creativity flourishes in spite of, not because of, one’s illness.

Speaking of artists with TB, this particular sentence was the main reason why I doubted if an editor cast their full attention on the manuscript as it landed on their desks. Emphasis added, of course:

Even in the 1940s, TB infections and disease remained common–twentieth-century TB survivors include Beatle Ringo Starr (who was institutionalized with TB as a teenager), the novelist George Orwell (who died of TB in 1950, just as curative treatment was becoming available), the writer Thomas Wolfe (who died of tuberculous meningitis in 1938), and the actor Vivian Leigh (who lived with TB for over twenty-five years).

Folks, let’s chip in and buy the editorial staff of Crash Course books a nice set of Merriam-Websters. While you’re doing that, I’ll head up the road to Riverside Cemetery in Asheville to visit Wolfe’s grave and ask him how he managed to both survive and die from tubercular meningitis at the same time. That’s quite a trick.

*I absolutely refuse to either read that book or watch that movie. I, too, spent my adolescence in and out of hospitals with a chronic illness and I don’t need that negativity back in my life. The last two years gave me enough flashbacks, thank you very much.

Illusion, Paula Volsky

5 stars

First Sentence: When one of the serfs was caught with a bundle of seditious pamphlets in his pocket, the Marquis vo Derrivalle was understandably infuriated.

Thoughts: In a fantasy version of 1780s France, the peasants are revolting. Whether that last word is a verb or an adjective depends on your place in society. The Exalted choose the adjective, the lower classes like the verb.

The Marquis vo Derrivalle decides to Make an Example of the serf with the seditious pamphlets and arranges a public beating. His daughter, Eliste, doesn’t much care until her maid Stelli, who is engaged to the unlucky serf, begs her to intervene with her father. Eliste doesn’t want to until she finds out that Stelli’s brother, Dref, is going to speak with the Marquis. In the mood her father’s in, Eliste knows this would be a very bad idea. She convinces Dref that now is not the time to talk to the Marquis, then asks her father if he would go for a milder punishment. Her father’s furious about the pamphlets and refuses to listen to her.

The serf dies after the beating. Dref, who was forced to watch with everyone else on the estate, starts a fistfight and ends up punching the Marquis. That’s a death sentence right there. Eliste doesn’t want her friend to die. He was educated with her as an experiment by her father and ended up being a genuine polymath. She asks her Uncle Quinz, a recluse magician, if he will help Dref escape with his magic. He does, and Dref makes his way to the capital, Shereen where he can hide in the crowds. Eliste follows a few weeks later to begin her service as one of the Queen’s Butterflies, her ladies-in-waiting.

When she gets to the Shereen her grandmother Zeralenn takes over her education. She teaches Eliste the most socially acceptable (to Exalted) way to sit, talk, enjoy things, have affairs, and dress. Eliste does honor to her grandmother’s teachings by making a splash when she arrives at court, even catching the eye of the king’s own brother. Most people consider the prince a catch, but Eliste thinks he’s a boor. That doesn’t stop him from endlessly pursuing her. Fortunately the peasants revolt and break into the palace before the prince can force her to do anything she doesn’t want to.

The revolution divides into two factions: the Nirennists and the Reparationists. The Nirennists are led by philosopher Shorvi Nirienne who’s thought a lot about the best way to create a better society. The Reparationists are led by Whiss Valeur, a man with a huge chip on his shoulder. Since they’re willing to resort to violence, the Reparationists soon gain the upper hand. Thanks to some long-dormant magical Sentients they find in a basement in the palace, they start the Reign of Terror. Instead of a guillotine they have Kokotte, a Sentient cabinet that reduces any flesh put inside to a heap of ashes. Soon she’s being fed a steady diet of former Exalted.

Eliste goes on quite a journey in the course of the novel. From a spoiled Exalted brat she becomes a prisoner kept in her grandmother’s house with her annoying cousin Aurelie* until she escapes and ends up on the street, trying to find a way to survive that doesn’t piss off the local thieves & beggars’ guild and keeps her from becoming a prostitute. She reunites with Dref because you knew their paths would cross again and joins the Niriennists as they try to stop the Reparationists from killing everyone that Whiss doesn’t like. Meanwhile Whiss’ cheese gains ever greater distance from his cracker.

It’s an exciting read with a satisfying ending. Everyone gets what they deserve except Eliste’s dog Prince vo Plume. Unfortunately the dog dies. In my head Eliste gets another dog after everything calms down. I imagine she’ll name it Plume in honor of the pup that sacrificed so much to save her. He was a Good Dog.

*If you don’t want to slap Aurelie until your hand falls off, you have no soul. La!