My Lady's Choosing
Kitty Curran & Larissa Zageris
Quirk Books
Fiction, Gamebook/Historical Fiction/Humor/Romance
Themes: Country Tales, Cross-Genre, Diversity, Ghosts, Shapeshifters, Thieves
***
Description
As a plucky yet penniless woman in Regency-era London, your prospects seem limited; indeed, it seems all but decided by your employer, the cranky old
dowager Lady Craven, that you're to marry a wealthy acquaintance of hers. Of course he has enough money to keep you comfortable for the rest of your days,
but you don't love him, and the thought of bearing him an heir is, well, unbearable. But your best friend, the Lady Evangeline Youngblood, is determined
that you can do better.
Will you find a way into the frozen heart of the sharp-tongued Sir Benedict Granville, bane of the ton singles scene? Are you brave enough to win
over Captain Angus MacTaggart, who hides the scars of war behind a devotion to orphans? Will you risk the dark secrets shrouding the mysterious Lord
Garraway Craven, who scarcely leaves his crumbling manor Hopesend? Or will you take a chance at a different kind of heat by following Lady Evangeline to
Egypt on a grand adventure? The difference between happily-ever-after and spinsterhood lies in your choices, so choose with care - or choose with
passion.
It all starts, as it so often does in Regency England, at a ball...
Review
I've mentioned before that I grew up devoted to the Choose Your Own Adventure books, and I still have a soft spot for interactive fiction. So,
when I needed a palate-cleanser read and I found this title through Overdrive, it seemed like a potentially amusing diversion. Unfortunately,
"potentially" was generally as close as it got to true amusement for me.
Written in a style deliberately derivative of generic Regency romances (the ones that know they're just vessels for soft-core titillation, and so don't
invest much, if any, effort in characterization or plotting or logic, even as they couch seductions in dance-around words that waver between humorous and
simply terrible without ever approaching sexy), the tale takes "you" on a long, winding journey through every genre trope the authors could think of. And
therein, I believe, lies the chief problem: the book lacks any focus, tackling Highland romance, pseudo-Jane Austen society seductions amid parlor room
verbal jousts, Gothic angst, exotic adventure in Egypt, ghost stories, werewolves, spy escapades, missing wives and returning old flames as plot devices,
even venturing into bisexuality as the Egypt-themed branch of the story has "you" fall for Lady Evangeline as well as numerous locals, male and female. It's
too big a bite to swallow without losing any semblance of story thread - and even a humorous interactive story needs some manner of story thread to keep the
reader interested; otherwise, it collapses into a heap of forgettable and repetitious twists, as this one unfortunately does. "You" weave around, back, up,
through, and all over the place, with innumerable opportunities for hook-ups wise and foolish, with everyone from the main cast to the postman. Where you end
up is less a matter of making smart or sensible choices and more a matter of luck of the draw, though most endings seem to see you with someone. (I admit I
didn't reach every ending.)
If you read a lot of Regency romances, are willing to poke fun at your own genre, and you aren't looking for any follow-through, you're likely to find this
more amusing than I did. For me, unfortunately, the joke wore thin early on, though I admit I've read far worse.