The Grand Sophy
Nov. 12th, 2018 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraContinuing my slow progression from "wait, you've never read any Heyer?" to, I suppose, eventually having read a great deal of Heyer; this would be something like number five. The first thing I need to say about this book is that there is some really gross and major antisemitism, which is sort of like finding broken glass in an otherwise delightful cake - I can't recommend this book, in the way that I wouldn't serve cake that I discovered to have broken glass in it, and I certainly wouldn't blame anyone else for feeling like the right amount of broken glass in their cake was zero and being very dubious about claims that it was in pretty big chunks, really, and you could pick them out. But it sucks, because it's a really delicious cake otherwise, and I in fact did choose to keep reading it and loved the rest of it, except for that one awful thing.
Brief description of the antisemitic content and how it fits into the rest of the book behind this cut: a young male secondary character has gotten himself into financial trouble and borrowed money from a moneylender, who is an ugly antisemitic caricature in every dimension; our heroine goes and confronts the moneylender on the young man's behalf, coercing the moneylender by various threats into accepting her repayment of the principle of the loan. It's the main event of one chapter (11), but is pretty self-contained as an episode - the heroine's having done it comes up again, but more from the angle of why the young man had confided in her rather than the hero, and the moneylender is never onscreen again. If you did want to try to eat around the broken glass, you could skip from the scene where Sophy is in the jewelry-shop to the beginning of chapter 12, although there is additional antisemitism in passing elsewhere (stingy people analogized to Jews, general disparaging of moneylenders), and, again, I don't want to be like "oh it's only a *little* internal bleeding". (Apparently some editions have cut a bunch of the worst lines, which sounds like a great idea.)
Spoilery thoughts about what I liked about it behind this one: Sophy has the forward momentum and elaborate schemes of a young Miles Vorkosigan, except in a cheerful, totally angst-free way like... someone in the comments to the article that talked about editions compared her to Pippi Longstocking, which is a *brilliant* comparison. I feel like many romance plots along these lines would at some point feel obliged to punish the woman for having tried to be too clever, and then the hero would comfort her, etc, but... nope! This is like the Ocean's 8 of Regency romance, she really is just that cool, that smooth, and... shit, no, this is *not the time* to be thinking about an Ocean's 8 Regency AU, stop that. (But, okay, romance as heist, The HEA as something pulled off by manipulation and boldness, there's something interesting there...)
Brief description of the antisemitic content and how it fits into the rest of the book behind this cut: a young male secondary character has gotten himself into financial trouble and borrowed money from a moneylender, who is an ugly antisemitic caricature in every dimension; our heroine goes and confronts the moneylender on the young man's behalf, coercing the moneylender by various threats into accepting her repayment of the principle of the loan. It's the main event of one chapter (11), but is pretty self-contained as an episode - the heroine's having done it comes up again, but more from the angle of why the young man had confided in her rather than the hero, and the moneylender is never onscreen again. If you did want to try to eat around the broken glass, you could skip from the scene where Sophy is in the jewelry-shop to the beginning of chapter 12, although there is additional antisemitism in passing elsewhere (stingy people analogized to Jews, general disparaging of moneylenders), and, again, I don't want to be like "oh it's only a *little* internal bleeding". (Apparently some editions have cut a bunch of the worst lines, which sounds like a great idea.)
Spoilery thoughts about what I liked about it behind this one: Sophy has the forward momentum and elaborate schemes of a young Miles Vorkosigan, except in a cheerful, totally angst-free way like... someone in the comments to the article that talked about editions compared her to Pippi Longstocking, which is a *brilliant* comparison. I feel like many romance plots along these lines would at some point feel obliged to punish the woman for having tried to be too clever, and then the hero would comfort her, etc, but... nope! This is like the Ocean's 8 of Regency romance, she really is just that cool, that smooth, and... shit, no, this is *not the time* to be thinking about an Ocean's 8 Regency AU, stop that. (But, okay, romance as heist, The HEA as something pulled off by manipulation and boldness, there's something interesting there...)
