Tournament of Ruses – Kate Stradling
Flora Dalton wants nothing more than a quiet life in the countryside of Lenore, but her father’s promotion to the Parliament of Lords has uprooted her and planted her smack in the middle of a mess. Not only must she adjust to a new home, a new city, and a new circle of friends, but she also gets to endure a whole country gone mad with excitement: the Eternal Prince of Lenore—their famed and fabled protector—has decided at long last to take a consort!
Rumor says he’s going to marry the Prime Minister’s daughter, Viola Moreland, but the lords have petitioned him to consider each of their daughters in turn, and that includes poor Flora. Against her wishes she must navigate a sea of scheming females in a laughable tournament of feminine graces, even as deathly shadows encroach upon her doorstep. For while most everyone is fixated on the Eternal Prince’s love life, something much more sinister is afoot in Lenore, and Flora happens to be at the very heart of it.
While this still makes it to four stars for being entertaining and enjoyable, it didn’t impress me as much as the first in the series. (I bought the second as soon as I finished the first, which is not something I do all the time.)
First, the stakes in this book didn’t seem nearly as high. In the first book, the kingdom’s fate hung in the balance, but here it’s mostly social stakes and some dangerous, but fairly easily defeated, attackers. Now, social stakes can feel just as urgent, in the right hands, but here I found myself thinking about the peasants who were being taxed so that all these flighty aristocrats could have extravagant parties, and thinking they were being ripped off.
Secondly, the main character wasn’t nearly as strong. Viola, in the first book, is competent, sensible, determined, independent-minded, and willing to sacrifice herself in the right cause. Flora, in this book, while intelligent and sensible, is several times accused (with some justification) of being a bit spineless and just going along with things, and never actually commits that strongly to her duties; she always wants to give up and go back to her quiet country existence, even right near the end.
And third, the copy editing, which was decent with a few issues in the first book, is much shakier in this one. Lots of homonym errors and other vocabulary problems, plus a good many typos. The author can’t make up her mind whether the street where the lords live is “Lords’ Row” (which it should be) or “Lord’s Row,” and at one point has both on the same page. I’ve reported these to Amazon, and hopefully they’ll be fixed soon.
All in all, though, enjoyable, and I’ve bought a third book by the same author, which is an important measure, for me, of how well a book has worked for me.
This book review is by Mike Reeves-McMillan and originally appeared on Goodreads. Mike writes the Gryphon Clerks novels, a series featuring heroic civil servants and engineers doing their best in a difficult world; the Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series, about underpowered magical practitioners stepping up to defend their city when nobody else will; and the Hand of the Trickster sword-and-sorcery series, in which a servant of the trickster god exalts the humble and humbles the exalted. His short stories have appeared in a number of professional and semiprofessional venues, including the Terry Pratchett tribute anthology In Memory.
