![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reading: Arsenic for Tea
May. 22nd, 2016 11:28 amArsenic for Tea is the second of Robin Stevens' series of novels featuring 1930s schoolgirl detectives Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong. I read the first, Murder Most Unladylike, last year, and was surprised how very un-cosy it was given that it was a combination of two of the cosiest genres around, boarding school stories and Golden Age mysteries, but also very impressed by just how good it was.
The second book moves from the school setting to Daisy's ancestral pile for a country-house mystery which explicitly owes a lot to Dorothy L Sayers' Clouds of Witness, with the chief suspects in the murder of a guest being Daisy's own family. Being older and more genre-savvy than the target readership, I did work out a couple of the plot points fairly early on, but twists and red herrings abound and I didn't guess the identity of the murderer until the final reveal.
Like the first book, this uses the reactions of other characters to Hazel, who is Chinese, to interrogate the default social assumptions of 1930s fiction in an intelligent way; Stevens doesn't shy away from highlighting the casual racism and focus on the privileged upper classes of the genres she's riffing off, but without ever making the mistake of assuming that characters who act in ways that would be unacceptable by modern standards must be generally unsympathetic. Daisy, who I found rather unlikeable in the first book, is given a chance to grow up here, becoming more human and sympathetic, though I still think that Hazel is much too good for her, and it's nice to get to know some of the other Deepdean girls a bit better soon. I'm looking forward to reading the third and fourth (and subsequent) books in the series in due course.
The second book moves from the school setting to Daisy's ancestral pile for a country-house mystery which explicitly owes a lot to Dorothy L Sayers' Clouds of Witness, with the chief suspects in the murder of a guest being Daisy's own family. Being older and more genre-savvy than the target readership, I did work out a couple of the plot points fairly early on, but twists and red herrings abound and I didn't guess the identity of the murderer until the final reveal.
Like the first book, this uses the reactions of other characters to Hazel, who is Chinese, to interrogate the default social assumptions of 1930s fiction in an intelligent way; Stevens doesn't shy away from highlighting the casual racism and focus on the privileged upper classes of the genres she's riffing off, but without ever making the mistake of assuming that characters who act in ways that would be unacceptable by modern standards must be generally unsympathetic. Daisy, who I found rather unlikeable in the first book, is given a chance to grow up here, becoming more human and sympathetic, though I still think that Hazel is much too good for her, and it's nice to get to know some of the other Deepdean girls a bit better soon. I'm looking forward to reading the third and fourth (and subsequent) books in the series in due course.
