30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 3
Book 2/30
Whoops, I slept on this one. Should have read it sooner! Because it was a delight. You know, if you’re defining “delight” as something that purposefully stokes your anger and your sense of righteousness by making you feel protective of the civil rights and bodily autonomy of fictional characters. With magic! So I guess that is how I define “delight.”
I’m not going to go too deep into the world here because part of the fun was experiencing it without know what was going on, but bare bones here, our main character is Beatrice, and she is about to go on the marriage market, here called Bargaining Season. Think a season like in Regency romances, where girls are introduced into the ton to catch a husband, but with magic in play. And the patriarchy taking the extra horrid controlling step of putting a literal collar on a woman once she is married. But Beatrice doesn’t want to get married. She wants to be a sorceress.
I enjoyed the heck out of this audiobook. Moira Quirk does an impeccable job with all the voices, and the pacing, and the narrative timing. She made my favorite character even better. I think I still would have enjoyed myself if I’d read the hard copy, but the audiobook definitely enhanced the experience.
There are two reasons I couldn’t give this five stars. The first is because of Beatrice’s father. SPOILERS He got absolutely zero comeuppance, and he deserved it. BOY HOWDY did he deserve it. He actually got what he wanted, and nobody rubbed anything in his face at all and it was SO DISAPPOINTING. If you’re gonna write a character who is a literal representation of the patriarchy, there needs to be some cathartic character smashing at the end. That’s just how these things work END SPOILERS. The second reason is because there is a romance in here, but I don’t think one of half of it was fleshed out enough. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t very compelling either. There were any number of things I found more interesting than the romance. Though, again, it was fine! Could have been better, though.
Definitely recommend this one and maybe now I’ll finally get around to this author’s other books, too!
