Betraying Season by Marissa Doyle
Oct. 31st, 2009 01:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meganbmooreThe sequel to Doyle’s Bewitching Season, this is a case of a sophomore effort that doesn’t quite live up to its predecessor.
After years of not being as good at magic as her twin sister, Persephone, Penelope Leland has come to Ireland to officially study magic with her former governess’s new father-in-law. Her fellow students-all men used to thinking of women as having “inferior” magic-react to this in a number of ways, none particularly flattering (More toned-down versions of fairly realistic ideas of what elite young academics would have thought in the real Victorian era when asked to study with a young society girl in 1838.) and an elegant woman, Lady Keating, takes an interest in her.
Lady Keating, it seems, needs a young woman with magic to assist her in a plot against the newly-crowned Queen Victoria. Her own daughter, Doireann, was meant to fill this role, but no longer can. To draw Pen into her plots, Lady Keating asks her son, Niall, to woo Pen and draw her into the family, not expecting Niall to actually fall for Pen. Many parts of this are awesome, particularly Doireann’s bitterness and the mystery of what she’s up to, and Niall’s being annoyed at having to act like a mysterious romantic figure. Add in Pen’s adventures as a decided non-academic trying to be an academic and dealing with the fae in the basement and a courtship that manages to be charming despite being based on deceit, and, for the most part, you have a pretty engaging book.
Where it falls short for me is that Bewitching Season was about Pen and Persy being sisters and having adventures and being on a quest to save another woman and Persy being confused about her love life while Pen madly tried her hand at hooking Persy up with the cute boy next door. Betraying Season, however, falls into the typical metanarrative theme of pitting the virtuous heroine against the evil worldly villainess, and making all of Pen’s active allies male, as the other prominent women are either bedridden or antagonistic.
I do like how things turned out in the end, but I can’t help but sigh at how a book that cheerfully shunned irritating gender-based metanarrative themes has a sequel so willing to embrace them.
After years of not being as good at magic as her twin sister, Persephone, Penelope Leland has come to Ireland to officially study magic with her former governess’s new father-in-law. Her fellow students-all men used to thinking of women as having “inferior” magic-react to this in a number of ways, none particularly flattering (More toned-down versions of fairly realistic ideas of what elite young academics would have thought in the real Victorian era when asked to study with a young society girl in 1838.) and an elegant woman, Lady Keating, takes an interest in her.
Lady Keating, it seems, needs a young woman with magic to assist her in a plot against the newly-crowned Queen Victoria. Her own daughter, Doireann, was meant to fill this role, but no longer can. To draw Pen into her plots, Lady Keating asks her son, Niall, to woo Pen and draw her into the family, not expecting Niall to actually fall for Pen. Many parts of this are awesome, particularly Doireann’s bitterness and the mystery of what she’s up to, and Niall’s being annoyed at having to act like a mysterious romantic figure. Add in Pen’s adventures as a decided non-academic trying to be an academic and dealing with the fae in the basement and a courtship that manages to be charming despite being based on deceit, and, for the most part, you have a pretty engaging book.
Where it falls short for me is that Bewitching Season was about Pen and Persy being sisters and having adventures and being on a quest to save another woman and Persy being confused about her love life while Pen madly tried her hand at hooking Persy up with the cute boy next door. Betraying Season, however, falls into the typical metanarrative theme of pitting the virtuous heroine against the evil worldly villainess, and making all of Pen’s active allies male, as the other prominent women are either bedridden or antagonistic.
I do like how things turned out in the end, but I can’t help but sigh at how a book that cheerfully shunned irritating gender-based metanarrative themes has a sequel so willing to embrace them.
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Date: 2009-10-31 01:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-31 02:10 pm (UTC)