Just finished!
I felt like they used the same "EGADS, A PLOT TWIST!" device twice, with the reveal that Anne Catherick was illegitimate (gasp! horror! as if that wasn't pretty obvious from the moment they talked about how much she looked like Laura) and then the reveal that Sir Percival was, also. I was glad that they finally explained why he felt the need to go fake a marriage registry sooner or later (and it was very much in character for it to be because he needed cash) because for the whole church/lawyer/fire saga I didn't really get it. Why go do something obviously illegal when no one was bothering to ask about it anyway? :P
Anyway. I liked the Marian/Count dynamic, too. Some parts of it reminded me a teeeeensy bit of Tib/Tig. More on his side than hers. I wasn't so bothered by Laura being frail and delicate because she did make some attempts to have agency of her own when she went to London after Marian, and I think she had a sort of 'quiet strength' in keeping her composure through the first half of the novel that VE readers would have appreciated.
Everything after the fire felt like falling action to me, and there was a lot of it. Maybe it was supposed to still be rising through the vague political Illuminati stuff, but that seemed a little shoehorned in to me since there hadn't been any build up to any of it in the rest of the novel. It was more like the author wrote the book that he wanted to write, with this evasive Secret that finally came out in a very dramatic scene, and then was like "well, shit, I can't end this without giving the Count/Laura/Mr. Fairlie the endings they deserve," so he came up with this whole other plot to hastily fix those points up. I didn't hate it, it just felt like something of a nonsequitor.
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I felt like they used the same "EGADS, A PLOT TWIST!" device twice, with the reveal that Anne Catherick was illegitimate (gasp! horror! as if that wasn't pretty obvious from the moment they talked about how much she looked like Laura) and then the reveal that Sir Percival was, also. I was glad that they finally explained why he felt the need to go fake a marriage registry sooner or later (and it was very much in character for it to be because he needed cash) because for the whole church/lawyer/fire saga I didn't really get it. Why go do something obviously illegal when no one was bothering to ask about it anyway? :P
Anyway. I liked the Marian/Count dynamic, too. Some parts of it reminded me a teeeeensy bit of Tib/Tig. More on his side than hers. I wasn't so bothered by Laura being frail and delicate because she did make some attempts to have agency of her own when she went to London after Marian, and I think she had a sort of 'quiet strength' in keeping her composure through the first half of the novel that VE readers would have appreciated.
Everything after the fire felt like falling action to me, and there was a lot of it. Maybe it was supposed to still be rising through the vague political Illuminati stuff, but that seemed a little shoehorned in to me since there hadn't been any build up to any of it in the rest of the novel. It was more like the author wrote the book that he wanted to write, with this evasive Secret that finally came out in a very dramatic scene, and then was like "well, shit, I can't end this without giving the Count/Laura/Mr. Fairlie the endings they deserve," so he came up with this whole other plot to hastily fix those points up. I didn't hate it, it just felt like something of a nonsequitor.