LynneC’s review of Mask of Duplicity (Jacobite Chronicles, Book 1) by Julia Brannan
Historical fiction published by Harlequin Desire 3 Jul 12
When this book came up on a list I subscribe to, I was really excited. Oh, a book set in my favourite period about a conflict I know a little bit about. The reviews said the book was historically accurate, so away I went.
I ended up DNF’ing it halfway through. If I weren’t reading it for review, I wouldn’t have lasted that long. I skimmed to the end, just to see how it all ended up. It didn’t really end, you have to buy the next one to find out.
Another disappointment. In this case what the author needed was a really good, thorough content and developmental edit. Preferably by someone who understands the period. She’s obviously had a copyedit, since the sentences are grammatically correct and the spelling is fine, but this is a tedious, jumbled mess, when it could have been so good. There are some great ideas here struggling to find their way out.
Although I found it in the historical romance section, I have to warn you, it’s not a romance. The story also isn’t complete, so you have to buy more to find out what happens.
Let’s start at the beginning. A Scot is walking through the heather (ouch!) and there are tantalizing hints of what is to come, so strong, in fact, that it ruins any surprise in the rest of the story. A decent editor would suggest deleting it, because this isn’t where the story starts, and it doesn’t really push the reader on or set the tone.
So the real beginning is with the heroine who is behaving like a hoyden with her servants, with whom, of course, she is very friendly. Calls them all by their first names (I can see you wincing from here!). A dowry like that would draw fortune-hunters, and they would know, so she’d be kidnapped and taken to the border tout-suite, if she wandered around her estate on her own. The modern attitude of the heroine drew me right out of the story. She won’t marry, except for love. She thinks a maid having a child out of wedlock is excusable and compares her, as the modern woman might, to her brother, who has had many women.
“It is not the way of my world. In my world a woman is not to be condemned for one mistake, nor to be branded a harlot for committing the same action that a man is commended for!”
And
“I hate being part of a society that treats women as commodities, to be sold to the highest bidder.”
She wanders around in towns and villages as if she were an ordinary woman, and consorts with her servants. All that is so far out of the mindset of the time that Beth sounds jarringly modern. It isn’t just the attitude, it’s the way that people accept such behavior, when in reality all Beth’s brother had to do was commit her to a lunatic asylum and take control of her fortune as her next living relative.
Beth lives in a small manor house and her brother is in the army. Unfortunately, he has a sergeant’s commission. That isn’t right. No gentleman would take a non-commissioned officer’s place. He’d buy a commission, or he wouldn’t go at all. Okay, let it pass. It’s not impossible. He might even have taken the King’s shilling.
But we are on even shakier ground when we discover that our heroine has a massive dowry of twenty thousand pounds. First, there is no way a gentleman, however wealthy, would leave that amount to a portion, when his estate was worth less than that. To a Georgian gentleman, the estate was all. Twenty thousand pounds was the kind of dowry only the very richest women could command. As an example, the estate of a duke averaged at around ten thousand a year. I know the author wanted to give motive, but that is unbelievable. Maybe have a bequest from an eccentric uncle (very useful, eccentric uncles) that is unlocked when she marries. Still, the dowry belongs to her husband, not to her, and would probably come back to her in the form of settlements. With that kind of money, she could have showed up in a London ballroom in rags and found a husband. But she won’t do it because she wants love. Personally, I hate that trope. She could save her brother’s estate and marry. But she wants to run around the estate and risk being kidnapped for her fortune. That state of affairs got so bad that a law was passed in 1754 to prevent it happening so often.
Every now and then there is an effort to pull the story back into its historical time. Beth’s appearance is described a few times and seems about right. And in long, tedious passages of “As you know, Bob,” conversations, the politics is explained in mind-numbing detail. As an example:
“Henry Cunningham had come from a staunch Anglican and Hanoverian family, who had thoroughly approved of the exile of the Catholic King James II in 1688, and his replacement by William of Orange, later succeeded by the Elector of Hanover, who became George I.”
Kind of duh for the people who lived then. The author is explaining either to show off her knowledge or for the benefit of the dumb reader. The golden rule of historical fiction is to explain what the reader needs to know, when she needs to know it. Otherwise, you end up with pages and pages of exposition, like there is here. Not everybody is in love with the politics of Britain in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. Even if you are, there are some really good textbooks available. Men did discuss politics after dinner and in the clubs. But not like the quotation above, because anyone who didn’t know the king wasn’t the Elector of Hanover wouldn’t be interested in politics. So the exposition is to the reader and is about as omniscient as a writer can get.
Plus, useless conversations like:
“How on earth do you know that, Elizabeth?” asked Isabella. “I thought you had never been to Court.” Beth looked at her cousin impatiently. “No, but one does not need to go to Court to read the newspapers, which are always full of gossip about the king and his animosity towards his son.”
Isabella would know that. Just saying. Eventually the practice of explaining the political background drove me away. Either a reader won’t care or will know it already, and, in any case, nobody reads a novel for a history lesson.
Big, big sections of exposition are lightly disguised as conversation, lots of politics, instead of assimilating it into people’s attitudes and minds. They did not discuss politics like it was a modern textbook. Parts of one speech seem to have been copied and paraphrased wholesale from various textbooks, and they jump out at the reader as not being in the author’s voice, nor in the voice of any recognisable character.
There is a very uncomfortable scene where a brother nearly rapes his sister. So that’s a trigger warning for some people. I write steamy and erotic romance, and I found it disgusting, not to put too fine a point on it. The scene should be curtailed or left out completely. There’s absolutely no need for it.
There are a lot of careless historical mistakes, as well as mistakes in attitude. At one point characters discuss marrying under a civil ceremony instead of a church one. There were no civil ceremonies in this era, not until much later in the next century. The whole business of being presented at court was totally misunderstood. It was done by appointment, and a man could never introduce an unmarried young lady. Title errors happen, and more than once. “Lord Edward” is not a title. He would be “Lord Title.” There’s references to a “pub,” which was not a term Georgians would have understood. And so on and so forth. Anachronisms in word use abounded, such as “bloody hell,” (not used until WWI) and “pussyfooting” (first recorded use 1893), “badger” in the sense of to pester, (1790), and so on. “Nice,” in the sense of “pleasant,” when it meant “fussy.”
Our heroine is Beth. The hero is more murky. There are several contenders, and it isn’t resolved at the end of the book, even though the heroine does marry someone. Anyone with a morsel of sense would have worked it all out by that point (trying hard not to put in spoilers!). The author would have done much better giving the reader a good sense of who the heroine is and who the hero is, but to do that, she would have to have a better mastery of writing technique. The characters are either very good or very bad. There is no sense of in between, and motivations were, if they weren’t explicitly explained, put into the characters’ actions and behaviour.
The point of view is seriously wrong. It starts in the omnipotent, but darts into third person from time to time without warning and back again to omnipotent. That is typical of most of the story. Further into the story the head-hopping becomes dizzying. I don’t think the author knows what using point of view means, because she switches wildly, often in the same paragraph.
There are uses of grammatical expletives – the undefined ‘it.’ So many. And filters. That’s when the author says, “she felt,” “she saw” and so on, where, if the author was firmly seated in the character’s head, there is no need for it. As in:
“She looked down at the carpet, saw the spreading brown stain of the muddy water dripping from her skirt, and fought off the weakness. She heard Edward ask Richard to go and inform the ladies that Elizabeth was safe, and the door closed quietly. She felt better now that the waves of hatred lapping against her back had gone.”
Three consecutive sentences starting with three consecutive filters.
There is one sentence that I treasure. “She treasured her memories of the knife-throwing lessons with her mother.” So sentimental!
And there is no real ending, something not explained by the author in the blurb. It’s only the beginning, and the reader is far from discovering who the real hero is. I did one continuity historical series, and I made sure that each separate book had a happy ending.
Grade: DNF
Summary:
Following the death of their father, Beth’s brother Richard returns from the army to claim his share of the family estate. However, Beth’s hopes of a quiet life are dashed when Richard, dissatisfied with his meagre inheritance and desperate for promotion, decides to force her into a marriage for his military gain. And he will stop at nothing to get his way.
Beth is coerced into a reconciliation with her noble cousins in order to marry well and escape her brutal brother. She is then thrown into the glittering social whirl of Georgian high society and struggles to conform. The effeminate but witty socialite Sir Anthony Peters offers to ease her passage into society and she is soon besieged by suitors eager to get their hands on her considerable dowry. Beth, however, wants love and passion for herself, and to break free from the artificial life she is growing to hate. She finds herself plunged into a world where nothing is as it seems and everyone hides behind a mask. Can she trust the people professing to care for her?
The first in the series about the fascinating lives of beautiful Beth Cunningham, her family and friends during the tempestuous days leading up to the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, which attempted to overthrow the Hanoverian King George II and restore the Stuarts to the British throne.
Join the rebellion of one woman and her fight for survival in…
The Jacobite Chronicles.
No excerpt available.
