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Reading: Sorcerer to the Crown
Mar. 17th, 2016 08:23 pmZen Cho was on the panel on "The Fantasy of White History" I went to at Nine Worlds last year, and mentioned her forthcoming novel, Sorcerer to the Crown, a fantasy romance set in Regency England (I think she described it as "Georgette Heyer with magic", though I may be misremembering - it certainly felt like Heyer, or possibly Thackeray*, with magic), and I thought it sounded interesting and like something I wanted to get when it came out.
I found it a quick, fun read; definitely more Heyer than Austen, and despite comparisons really not very similar to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell at all. It had entertaining and engaging characters (particularly the heroine, but I was also very taken with the supporting character Damerell) and some sparky comedy of manners, overlaying a serious examination of issues around gender, race and colonialism. Despite the comparisons I've mentioned already, what it really reminded me of was Diana Wynne Jones, with maybe a touch of Harry Potter; I don't think it was marketed as YA but felt very much as if it could be.
If I have a gripe, it's that the Regency setting fades into the background rather; apart from a couple of mentions of Bonaparte, I felt that it could have been set in any era from the Early Modern to the Victorian. This isn't really a problem, but when a book is specifically described as "Regency" I kind of expect it to be a bit more obviously Regency. The plot is also fairly thin; I gather that the novel is the first of a trilogy, but it felt to me as though the various threads were tied up so neatly at the end that I do wonder what more there is to say. But, all in all, I liked it a lot, and if the Kindle edition did have rather a lot of typographical errors and some frankly bad formatting, that didn't distract from my enjoyment (though I might advise anyone who wants to try it to go for a paper copy instead).
*I say "possibly" mostly because I never actually finished reading Vanity Fair
I found it a quick, fun read; definitely more Heyer than Austen, and despite comparisons really not very similar to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell at all. It had entertaining and engaging characters (particularly the heroine, but I was also very taken with the supporting character Damerell) and some sparky comedy of manners, overlaying a serious examination of issues around gender, race and colonialism. Despite the comparisons I've mentioned already, what it really reminded me of was Diana Wynne Jones, with maybe a touch of Harry Potter; I don't think it was marketed as YA but felt very much as if it could be.
If I have a gripe, it's that the Regency setting fades into the background rather; apart from a couple of mentions of Bonaparte, I felt that it could have been set in any era from the Early Modern to the Victorian. This isn't really a problem, but when a book is specifically described as "Regency" I kind of expect it to be a bit more obviously Regency. The plot is also fairly thin; I gather that the novel is the first of a trilogy, but it felt to me as though the various threads were tied up so neatly at the end that I do wonder what more there is to say. But, all in all, I liked it a lot, and if the Kindle edition did have rather a lot of typographical errors and some frankly bad formatting, that didn't distract from my enjoyment (though I might advise anyone who wants to try it to go for a paper copy instead).
*I say "possibly" mostly because I never actually finished reading Vanity Fair
