Disenchanted & Co.
The Disenchanted & Co. series, Book 1
Lynn Viehl
Pocket Books
Fiction, Fantasy/Romance/Sci-Fi
Themes: Alternate Earths, Cross-Genre, Ghosts and Spirits, Girl Power, Magic Workers, Steampunk Etc., Urban Tales
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Description
In the colonial nation of Toriana, the march of science has done nothing to dispel the power of magic - utter nonsense, according to Charmain "Kit" Kitteridge, but when she gains a reputation for breaking spells, she's perfectly willing to make a business of it. People are reluctant enough to hire a woman, especially a scandalously single woman with no desire to marry, and she can't stand to see everyone, even her best friends, get in such tizzies over stuff she's never once seen work. But her latest job, helping the wealthy Lady Walsh investigate increasingly-malicious attacks from a "spirit" in her home, lands her in the heart of a dangerous game she doesn't understand, forced into company with a longtime-rival deathmage and a local constable, in a plot that might finally make even the great skeptic Kit believe in the blackest of magic.
Review
In reading this book, I experienced the frustration of being given mismatched pieces from different puzzles and being forced to try to cram them together. On
the one hand, Toriana - a steampunk alternate America where the American Revolution failed - is a decently realized setting, clearly with much thought put into its
history and structure (a little too much thought, to be honest, as the writing is prone to tangents on this account.) On the other, I'm given the flimsiest and,
frankly, least likable characters to follow through it, not to mention numerous other distractions and clutter.
The nominal heroine, Kit, prides herself on defying a sexist, oppressive society and setting her own course... but she's spent her entire life apparently thinking of
everyone else in the world as stupid simpletons for believing in magic just because she personally has not seen it. Yes, Kit is the only clear-eyed woman on a planet
of the blind. Even her best friends must be morons in her eyes; it never dawns on her that maybe, just maybe, there's a little more to this whole magic thing until
she's repeatedly struck over the head. (Not a spoiler to say magic is real: it's clear fairly early on that she's oversimplifying her reality in her flat denial,
especially when she reveals within two chapters that she can see spirits following funeral processions.) Then there are the two love interests, both of whom seem
more interested in what she isn't, or what she should be according to society and their personal twisted fantasies, than what she is; deathmage Lucien is a
vampire-level stalker, while constable Tommy is such an innocent, straight-laced boy one frankly wonders if he'd ever even honor his wedding night out of fear of
impropriety. But, then, Kit, for all her bluster about independence, turns out to be little but a shallow, easily-dominated woman when men finally treat her as women
are supposed to be treated: stalked, abducted, and practically pinned down. (The sex scenes, like most of the "romance," felt like they didn't belong in many ways,
more of those mismatched pieces being pounded into the puzzle. But, then, there's a whole unpleasant undercurrent to the treatment of women and sex here.) And this
isn't even getting into the magical end of the tale, which keeps changing its rules and coming up with new loopholes and twists and things magic can or can't do to
the point that I gave up caring. Why bother, when I didn't care about any of the characters involved? The story eventually builds to a tangled mess of a climax,
bringing together threads of politics, history, magic, relationships, Kit's personal history (which, coincidence of plot-convenient coincidences, is deeply entwined
with unfolding events), and more - only to fall back on the one of the oldest, stalest, most head-smackingly lame tricks in the book to slip out of the Gordian knot
it had tied itself into.
In the end, among myriad other questions, I was left to wonder why. Why spend all that time and effort crafting Toriana, only to populate it with shallow sketches of
characters? Why shoehorn in a "romance" straight out of the worst old bodice-rippers, where love meant a man showing a woman her place and the woman deciding she
enjoys being a thing instead of a person? Why create magic so convoluted that the story has to keep stopping itself to explain new developments the whole way
through? Why spend so much time having characters dance around insulting each other or denying obvious things rather than progressing the plot? And why, oh, why that
complete cop-out of a conclusion? I cannot answer those questions, but I can answer the question of whether I'll follow Kit's further adventures: not just no, but a
resounding no.