It’s taken me a while to get around to reading your debut, The Spymaster’s Lady. Back in the winter, Robin asked me if I would review it in a conversational review with her before your next book came out, and I promised that I would. When I got to reading it last week, my repsonse to The Spymaster’s Lady was far from Robin’s own experience of the book and she suggested that I convert the notes I had prepared for a conversational review into this letter instead, so that the review could stand on its own.

Readers who have not yet done so can find a plot summary for The Spymaster’s Lady in Jane’s A- review. Another opinion can be found in Jayne’s A- review. And readers should also be aware that this review will contain spoilers.

The writing in The Spymaster’s Lady is crystalline in its beauty and sharpness. The prose is just gorgeous, scintillating, and as others have noted, the French dialogue and Annique’s POV thoughts in French are absolutely spot on in capturing the cadences of the French tongue. You are a brilliant stylist, a wordsmith of the first order, and I am just in awe of your gift for language.

Therefore, I want so badly to love this book and give it my whole heart, and it is frustrating that I can’t.

My frustration centers on Annique’s character, but I don’t really dislike Annique herself. I feel that she is cute and therefore could have been endearing, but the problem I run into is that I don’t feel that her portrayal is consistent, or that she is all that she is being described as. To explain what I’m saying, I will go through my issues one by one.

First, we are told that Annique is an amazing spy, but as a good friend of mine pointed out when we discussed the book, every time Annique and Grey grapple in any way, he always gets the upper hand. When he wants to entrap her in chapter two, he succeeds (and he does it by using her thirst for water against her, as if she were a wild animal). When she tries to escape in the carriage, he stops her. When she tried to escape again (being softhearted and not wanting to kill him in the process), he knocks her away and hurts her. When he decides to drug her with opium so that she won’t attempt another escape, she does not detect the opium in her coffee, even though she’s blind and so her other senses are supposedly acute. And on it goes… He gets the upper hand every time, and puts one over on her more than once in the process.

There were a few times when Annique was able to do something that showed a bit of competence, especially toward the beginning of the book. I would get my hopes up that maybe the strong, successful spy described in everyone’s POV thoughts would materialize, but then Grey would set out to best her again, and she’d fall for his next trick. This made the feel stymied, especially in the book’s first half. By the second half, when Annique began to give away the most important state secrets she possessed to a man whom she thought was a complete stranger, I had given up my hopes that there was a brilliant female spy to be found in the pages of The Spymaster’s Lady.

Second, Annique also seems too vulnerable and innocent to me for someone who has been spying since childhood. I felt that her innocence and sense of wonder were childlike to a point where the age and power gaps between her and Grey were disturbing and made me uncomfortable at times, most especially when they were having sex.

There are places where the dialogue reinforces Annique’s extreme youth and inexperience, for example, Adrian actually says to her “Annique, you will not grow up to be big and strong if you don’t eat your vegetables” (I realize this was a witty remark, but it encapsulates the way I saw Annique). And Grey says, “You’re not a child, Annique. Stop acting like one.” Adrian calls her “Ma pauvre” and Grey, “My little halibut.” To me these sound like the kinds of things parents say to children. It made me feel that the heroine was being infantilized.

Third, I feel that Annique’s virginity is very improbable given how she makes her living. When Grey realizes that she doesn’t have much sexual experience, he has this thought:

How many men, Annique? Not many, I’ll bet. Did your masters keep you unawakened so you could play the boy more convincingly? Their mistake. It left her vulnerable. Achingly, ignorantly vulnerable. He’d use that against her, sooner or later.

It’s that “Achingly, ignorantly vulnerable” that I have a problem with in a character who is said to be a super-competent spy. And I also don’t understand why staying a virgin would make it easier for Annique to act the part of a boy. It’s my opinion that one is either a good actor, or a bad actor. I don’t see how sexual experience or lack thereof makes a difference.

Since I don’t feel that it’s a logical motive to keep a spy a virgin, especially when she already knows how to act the part of a courtesan and could no doubt glean important secrets through sex, I feel that the real reason for Annique’s virginity is to telegraph to readers that despite her being a French spy, Annique is a good girl and pure of heart. And using a heroine’s sexual ignorance to show that she is virtuous is admittedly not my favorite trope in romance.

I felt that the virginity=virtue trope was reinforced by the way Grey at first thought of Annique as both evil and a whore, and even tried to dress her in a whore’s clothing until he came to the realization that she was not an evil killer and not sexually experienced. The two realizations coincided with one another and came at the same point in the story.

This reminded me a bit of some of the romances from the 1970s and 1980s, like Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower, where the hero thinks the heroine is a whore and treats her badly until he finds physical proof of her virginity. I am glad that Grey did not go that far, but he did treat Annique coldly at first and his realization that she was neither sexually experienced not evil came on the heels of a scene in which they come close to loveless sex, so I was very strongly reminded of this “whore or virgin” trope.

A fourth reason why Annique’s character does not work so well for me is that she is a paragon. Vulnerable, brave, supposedly smart and said to excel at her job, brilliant at memorization, virginal, pure and gallant — not a personality flaw in sight. Nothing to give her a shade of gray. And that, especially when combined with her improbable virginity, makes her less than believable for me, and harder to relate to.

A fifth problem I had with the book was not in Annique herself but in the British spies’ reactions to Annique. Not only was she a paragon, but I kept feeling I was being told (in the hero and his friends’ thoughts and dialogue) what a paragon she was. How clever, how brave, how good, how expert a spy.

The hero and the secondary characters’ going on about Annique’s virtues made me feel that I was being told how to interpret Annique’s character. In other words, it felt heavy-handed. And since I did not agree with their assessment of Annique as a great spy, the feeling that I was constantly being told that she was something that she wasn’t was extremely frustrating to me.

There were times when other things felt heavy-handed to me as well, for example, there’s a conversation between Grey and his men when he tells them that Annique was in Bruges when some of their fellow spies died. Adrian and Doyle start recapping who died there, who they served with in the past, and how it was supposed to be an easy exchange of the Albion plans for the gold. But I saw no reason for Adrian and Doyle to be telling Grey that — he’s the section head spymaster, so he already knows all this. Which makes me feel like the information is there only for readers, and not because it is a natural subject matter for the characters.

Something else that felt heavy-handed to me was Annique’s admiration for the English spies. It was like the mirror image of their admiration for her, and those were places where I felt that rather than being left the room to interpret the characters of Grey, Doyle and Adrian for myself, I was being told what to think of them.

And that brings me to another topic, which is that the way entire British Service behaved around Annique seemed out of character for spies and interrogators who needed the information she held so badly.

In a nutshell, my problems with The Spymaster’s Lady all come down to the issue of believability. Spying is a rather ruthless and dirty business, and that was not reflected in the book, at least, not to my satisfaction.

I had difficulty suspending disbelief and that’s where I feel that I needed more — more competence from Annique, whose ineptitude only grew in the book’s second half, more ruthlessness and shades of gray from all the characters, more showing and less telling me (via the chorus of Annique’s admirers) what to think and feel. One of the things I look for in a book is room for interpretation, a place for my own imagination to connect with the characters, and for all the gorgeous writing, I don’t feel that I got that here.

At this point I have reached page 311 (chapter thirty-three), but the more I read, the more frustrated I grow. I don’t think I’d have made it this far if not for my original commitment to Robin. I’ve now read well over four-fifths of the book, so I could force myself to finish, but then I’d have to grade it, and there is simply no grade I could give The Spymaster’s Lady that would be reflective of both my appreciation of the beauty of the language, and my growing frustration that I did not find this book believable, realistic, or convincing. The more I read, the more the latter overshadows the former, and so, I think it best that I stop here. DNF.

Sincerely,

Janine

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or Powells or ebook format.

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1. REVIEW: The Spymaster’s Lady by Joanna Bourne
2. REVIEW: The Spymaster’s Lady by Joanna Bourne
3. Joanna Bourne Updates Blog, Provides Excerpt

What a struggle I had with writing this review. I know some ask what are the hardest reviews to write and I am convinced, after drafting and redrafting this one, it is the review of the book that you love. Because as a reader, I am trying to convey the beauty that is someone else’s writing so that others will see the same beauty. The best thing I can say to readers is to go the bookstore and read the first chapter.

The Spymaster’s Lady is about secrets. It is about the secrets the characters keep from each other. It is about the secrets that you, the author, keep from the reader. Annique, the Fox Cub, is an intentional mystery to Grey, the British Spymaster. But Grey is a mystery to Annique as well. Both characters fail to fit in the predetermined slots each has set for the other. “A man itches to peel you, veil by veil, laying your secrets bare, opening you up to reveal mysteries.”

However, the truth behind the secrets, the reveal, is always there for both the reader and the characters to see. It wasn’t until I read the book for a second time that I realized how brilliantly all the clues were laid out, like crumbs on the forest trail, for the reader to see. You even tell us, through Annique, that all the answers are there for the taking. “You ask many questions. Have I told you that? Now pay attention and I will teach you secrets.”

Because this story is so much about secrets and the constant reveal, I hesitate to say much about the plot at all for fear of giving too much away. Annique is a spy, trained from a very young age to be in the “Game”. It is believed that she is in possession of the plans to Albion, or plans for the French invasion of Great Britain. She is captured by another spy named Leblanc for her knowledge. She is imprisoned with two British spies, one gravely wounded. She escapes through cunning and guile and helps the English spies away as well, believing, in part that she would not leave anyone with Leblanc and that perhaps her good deed will come in handy down the road now that she is free to play the “Game” again. There is honor amongst spies.

Yet, Grey recognizes Annique instantly as someone who was involved with the death of his men at Bourges. That coupled with her knowledge of Albion makes her an irresistible capture. Even then, Annique is so skilled it takes three men to do the job. Over the course of the book, Grey and Annique play a cat and mouse game and Annique is often the winner.

The story is well devised because the conflict between Grey and Annique serves to be a metaphor for the larger Game played between spies. It isn’t always strength that wins either the game of love or life, but intelligence, quick wit, and craftiness.

One thing that I think will be universally exclaimed over is the use of language in this book. Annique is French and every thought or sentence that is uttered by Annique has that French flavor. Grey is English and his mannerism and way of speaking is also strictly English. The book has very few dialogue tags, if any, because a reader can gather immediately who is the speaker through the rhythm and phrasing of the words. It’s really a triumph.

The English spy spoke, deep and slow, out of the dark. “I would stand and greet you politely.” Chain clinked. “But I’m forced to be rude.”

It was a measure of how lonely she was that the voice of an enemy English came like a warm handclasp. “There is much of that in my life lately. Rudeness.”

or

“I remember what we have done together. I am almost sure it was not decent.” But she let him comb her hair back with his fingers and tuck a blanket around her and arrange her at ease along the seat. “I will decide what to do about it when I am awake. Perhaps I will try to strangle you once more. Though you have the most beautiful body imaginable. Like a large animal.”

Adrian murmured, “What complex and interesting nights you two must have.”

“Shut up,” Grey said.

or

“The English spies in Italy had a similar arrangement. I am all comprehension.”

The reason for the A- is that I felt that the emotional response of Annique to the reveal of one the biggest secret of the book was one that was not in keeping with the story that was built. But by that time, I wanted Annique to be happy. I was desperate for her HEA and would accept nothing less. In the hands of a less skilled author, it might have been a breaking point for me, but in this book, it was only a minor issue. I simply can’t wait for the next Joanna Bourne. I am all breathless anticipation. A-

Best,

Jane

You can purchase this book in ebook and mass market.

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1. Joanna Bourne Updates Blog, Provides Excerpt
2. REVIEW: Captain Sinister’s Lady by Darlene Marshall
3. REVIEW: Lady X’s Cowboy by Zoe Archer