![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocolatepotFinished Sorcerer to the Crown, time to update my analysis! (Very spoilery.)
To be sure, the Heyer style kept going to the last page and I love that no more than I did before. The heroine continues to do the cutesy innocent-chit-out-of-the-schoolroom, Anne-Shirleyish-almost asides and diversions when she speaks at length, even through the action-packed climax, and it was a pain in the butt.
But there was a lot of really good stuff loaded into the end of the book! Overall, I'd say the biggest problem was that the stuff from the end didn't get spread throughout it in editing. This includes the continuing opening up of the setting to non-European influences and politics - through a Chinese magician whose ways of doing magic reflect a different intellectual background, more going on with Mak Genggang, the leader of the Malaysian witches, and the revelation that Prunella's mother was the Grand Sorceress of Seringapatam. OTOH, as I complained before, the wider world still doesn't really feel integrated into the story. There's a brief mention near the end of an anecdote from Zacharias's childhood that makes it clear his adoptive semi-parents have never really known him, but the text doesn't particularly encourage us to reevaluate either of them. We barely know anything about Prunella's father except that early on we were told he was a decent guy who killed himself for presumably tragic reasons, but oh actually he married her mother for gain and stole Prunella plus some treasures, don't think about it too much. Prunella's mother probably died when the British took Mysore but also don't think about that too much. I guess this just may be a difference in what tropes you like - I am pretty much always on board for angst about not knowing parents, parental crimes, parental pre-book deaths (like any normal person /s), but I suppose that isn't universal.
There was also a ton more magic. In the first half, nearly all the magic was offstage or unimportant, apart from Prunella's guardian dropping in that she has the girls she teaches perform spells to debilitate themselves and send their magic out to be used by other (male) magicians. Once Zacharias starts teaching Prunella, though, there's more going on, and then there are assassination attempts and of course the big finale attack(s). I don't think fantasy needs magic to be front and center (I have started many stories that are secondary world but low magic or no magic settings), but when you make it important to the story in a Macguffiny way and hint at some really big deal magic, you've got to go there. Though the second half also had some stuff that kind of came out of nowhere but said "none of us are thinking about it too hard, it's okay!" Turns out making a bargain with a familiar allows them to eat your body as well as your frickin' soul when you die? And most of the people who know (only other people with familiars) are just okay with this? Prunella fully shrugs it off. The only person who is horrified is Zacharias, who made a bargain with the familiar who always belongs to the Sorcerer Royal to stop it from eating the previous SR, his not-dad, which allowed it to sort of go into him and eat a bit of himself regularly instead. This is the kind of thing that makes it problematic that we don't get a real in-depth look at their relationship - that's a huge thing to do for someone who owned you for a while (and took you away from your parents), and he never seems to regret it at all.
It also runs into the "protagonist keeping things from the reader" problem. This can be done, but it's hard.
Ultimately there are the seeds of a great book in here, but they're smothered by a superficial Georgette Heyer romance that's taking up way too much room. I'm not saying the editor was bad, but it feels like they allowed a lot of unnecessary stuff that screams "this is Regency!!" to stay for marketing reasons even though it's detrimental to the emotional stuff behind it.
To be sure, the Heyer style kept going to the last page and I love that no more than I did before. The heroine continues to do the cutesy innocent-chit-out-of-the-schoolroom, Anne-Shirleyish-almost asides and diversions when she speaks at length, even through the action-packed climax, and it was a pain in the butt.
But there was a lot of really good stuff loaded into the end of the book! Overall, I'd say the biggest problem was that the stuff from the end didn't get spread throughout it in editing. This includes the continuing opening up of the setting to non-European influences and politics - through a Chinese magician whose ways of doing magic reflect a different intellectual background, more going on with Mak Genggang, the leader of the Malaysian witches, and the revelation that Prunella's mother was the Grand Sorceress of Seringapatam. OTOH, as I complained before, the wider world still doesn't really feel integrated into the story. There's a brief mention near the end of an anecdote from Zacharias's childhood that makes it clear his adoptive semi-parents have never really known him, but the text doesn't particularly encourage us to reevaluate either of them. We barely know anything about Prunella's father except that early on we were told he was a decent guy who killed himself for presumably tragic reasons, but oh actually he married her mother for gain and stole Prunella plus some treasures, don't think about it too much. Prunella's mother probably died when the British took Mysore but also don't think about that too much. I guess this just may be a difference in what tropes you like - I am pretty much always on board for angst about not knowing parents, parental crimes, parental pre-book deaths (like any normal person /s), but I suppose that isn't universal.
There was also a ton more magic. In the first half, nearly all the magic was offstage or unimportant, apart from Prunella's guardian dropping in that she has the girls she teaches perform spells to debilitate themselves and send their magic out to be used by other (male) magicians. Once Zacharias starts teaching Prunella, though, there's more going on, and then there are assassination attempts and of course the big finale attack(s). I don't think fantasy needs magic to be front and center (I have started many stories that are secondary world but low magic or no magic settings), but when you make it important to the story in a Macguffiny way and hint at some really big deal magic, you've got to go there. Though the second half also had some stuff that kind of came out of nowhere but said "none of us are thinking about it too hard, it's okay!" Turns out making a bargain with a familiar allows them to eat your body as well as your frickin' soul when you die? And most of the people who know (only other people with familiars) are just okay with this? Prunella fully shrugs it off. The only person who is horrified is Zacharias, who made a bargain with the familiar who always belongs to the Sorcerer Royal to stop it from eating the previous SR, his not-dad, which allowed it to sort of go into him and eat a bit of himself regularly instead. This is the kind of thing that makes it problematic that we don't get a real in-depth look at their relationship - that's a huge thing to do for someone who owned you for a while (and took you away from your parents), and he never seems to regret it at all.
It also runs into the "protagonist keeping things from the reader" problem. This can be done, but it's hard.
Ultimately there are the seeds of a great book in here, but they're smothered by a superficial Georgette Heyer romance that's taking up way too much room. I'm not saying the editor was bad, but it feels like they allowed a lot of unnecessary stuff that screams "this is Regency!!" to stay for marketing reasons even though it's detrimental to the emotional stuff behind it.
