This book begins with its Victorian heroine scolding a vampire for having the bad manners to attack her at a party, and then stabbing it through the heart with her parasol when it Did Not Get the Message. I demand that all books that insist on having vampires have them get killed with a parasol for having bad manners.
Alexia Tarabotti is half-Italian, a spinster, outspoken, and a preternatural. Which is to say, she was born without a soul, and so has the ability to negate the abilities of supernatural beings with a touch.* Supernatural beings are supposed to know about her, and keep their distance, but the vampire in question didn’t. What’s more, she soon learns, the vampire shouldn’t even exist, and no one knows where it came from. In this Victorian England, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and the works are a part of normal society, and a group of werewolves (and their associates) known as BUR perform investigations for Queen Victoria. The head of BUR, Lord Connall Maccon (a werewolf
and a Scotsman, and so highly inappropriate, nobility or not) is sent to investigate. Never mind that Alexia is quite put out that her preternatural state prevents her from being an agent of BUR, which the two have clashed over in the past.
The book is ridiculously entertaining, and half the lines seem to have been written expressly to be quotable. It also has elements of every type of fiction associated with Victorian fiction associated with it, and I’m strongly reminded of the early Amelia Peabody mysteries. The inevitable romance between Alexia and Maccon is also much more fun than expected, and parts that would normally make me roll my eyes instead had me giggling madly. Maccon is also far more charming than a man that alpha should be. But then, a lot of the charm comes from the fact that he loves Alexia (pretty much before the book even starts)
because she’s as alpha as he is on her off days, and more alpha than he is on most days.
All that said, Carriger’s writing does sometimes slip into “look how clever I am” and she’s very inconsistent in how characters are referred to, altering between referring to a character as “Title Surname” and “Personal Name” in consecutive paragraphs from the same narrative voice, which is often disjointing. And, despite the many alterations to and inclusions she’s added to Victorian London, one thing that doesn’t seem to have changed is that everyone is white.
All in all, however, this being my first full (non-reread) book of 2010 puts 2010 off to a pretty good start.
*This makes me wonder what would happen if she were to, say, touch a zombie. Like, vampires here don’t seem to be undead in the “resurrected corpse that stays ‘alive’ by drinking blood” sense, but presumably, zombies in this world are still animated corpses. So, if she touched one, would it reset itself, or would they stay down, in which case she could probably singlehandedly prevent a zombie apocalypse. As long as it wasn’t teatime.
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