Lady Friday by Garth Nix

While I haven’t liked Nix’s Keys to the Kingdom series as much as I did the Old Kingdom series, I found the first four pretty entertaining and enjoyable, despite having some serious problems with Drowned Wednesday. The fifth installment, unfortunately, I found rather dull.

Busy with her experiments robbing humans of their memories, Lady Friday isn’t interested having to fight Arthur for the piece of the Will she was entrusted with, and so she resigns from her position and tells Arthur, Superior Saturday, and the Piper that whichever gets there first can have it. There are the typical fun bits with Arthur encountering her oddball underlings and I approve of Leaf continuing to get to have her own adventures, but Lady Friday herself is almost a non-entity, and at this point, I’m mostly interested in Piper and the Piper’s Children (and I get the annoying impression that Suzy is considered less important now that Arthur has a male Piper’s Child as a buddy to have adventures with) and what’s going on with Dame Primus. And, in complete honesty, a week after reading it and I’ve forgotten most of what’s happened.

Faro's Daughter by Georgette Heyer

Max Ravenscar’s much-too-young cousin, Adrian, is in love with Deborah Grantham, who works in the gambling-club her aunt owns, and so Max is asked by his aunt to buy Deborah off so that she’ll reject Adrian’s offer of marriage. Deborah, for her part, has no interest in marrying Adrian, but isn’t above letting the insufferable Max think she is just to drive him crazy. Add to that a young woman needing rescuing from a much older fiancé and the fact that Deborah’s soldier brother and Max’s flighty sister are in love, not to mention overeager servants and a variety of misunderstandings, and you have Faro’s Daughter.

Like The Grand Sophy, I think this entertained me more than I strictly liked it. On the one hand, I didn’t finish it wondering if one of the lovers was going to end up an alcoholic a few years down the road, and I didn’t spend a large chunk of the book cringing at the lead’s antics. On the other, I’m not really convinced that Max and Deborah really know each other. I’m not sure they had a single encounter that didn’t revolve around insults and/or misunderstandings. I also think the book was a bit too much from Max’s perspective for my taste. Not because he’s the guy and Deborah’s the girl, but because he was way too eager to always think the worst of Deborah, and while it made sense, Deborah’s thinking the worst of him was easier to read because it was based on his actions, as opposed to presumptions caused by hearsay.

But, as I said, it did entertain me quite a bit, though it’s clear that many of my unloved tropes of romance novels originated from this book. This is not Heyer’s fault, as she actually handles things quite well and is not responsible for what inspiration her fans took from her book, but I admit to some mental fist shaking and “Curse you, Heyer! Must you have been so popular?”