Shades of Milk and Honey (Glamourist Histories, #1)

by Mary Robinette Kowal

This is a fantasy novel you wish Jane Austen had written. "Shades of Milk and Honey" is an intimate portrait of Jane Ellsworth of Dorchester, a woman ahead of her time in a version of Regency England where the manipulation of glamour is considered an essential skill for a lady of quality. Despite the prevalence of magic in everyday life, other aspects of Dorchester's society are not that different: Jane and her sister Melody's lives still revolve around vying for the attentions of eligible men. While Jane's skill with glamour is remarkable, it is her sister who is fair of face, and therefore wins the lion's share of the attention. At the ripe old age of twenty-eight, Jane has resigned herself to being invisible forever. But when her family's honour is threatened, she finds that she must push her skills to the limit in order to set things right - and, in the process, accidentally wanders into a love story of her own.

• ISBN10: 0765325608
• ISBN13: 9780765325600
• Publish Date: 7 June 2011 (first published 3 August 2010)
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 28 August 2013
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Tor Books
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 304
• Language: English

Reviews

[mrs_mander_reads]

This was sheer perfection. An amalgamation of everything I love: Pride & Prejudice, magic, and an unsuspecting love. I'm going to gush forever about this book.

[wyvernfriend]

This book hit a very good sweet spot for me and sucked me in, hook, line and sinker. I want to purchase my own copy to reread and the series is going to be high on my wishlist.

This is a romance, a story that feels like a Jane Austen Novel but with added magic. A magic of illusion, glamour. This magic is something pretty trivial, it creates an illusion of movement in pictures, a picturescape to accompany music, allows a dress designer to show a customer what the dress would look like when complete in miniature, serves as an alarm for a hunter. Small things. It's considered a skill all accomplished women should have, and uses fabric-like language to describe it.

Jane is an accomplished weaver of glamour, she has resigned herself to spinsterhood as she's twenty-eight and plain. Her sister has more prospect of marriage than she does and she is content with that. However she finds herself caught up in a situation that requires her to push herself to her limits and along the way finds that maybe, just maybe, she might be able to find love.

This drew me in and kept me reading. I sincerely didn't want to leave it until I finished it and look forward to some day re-reading it. The characters came across as if they had stepped out of a period fiction of the regency and had comfortably settled into this one. It just didn't misstep for me at any stage and this one will go on my favourites shelf on book sites.

[ladygrey]

I can't in good conscience give this less than 3 stars because it's well written and I liked her sense of magic a great deal. The characters were pleasant enough (mostly). Jane did annoy me with how naive she was in the middle. I know the counter is always that women were often more naive historically, but you can only go so far with that. Eventually you have to write a book that doesn't annoy your reader, because otherwise it looks like you're keeping her naive to allow the plot to go the direction you want. Which is also annoying.

More than anything, though the ending made me want to give it 2 stars. I hate it when the heroine ends up with some guy who is not the guy the author has spent the novel telling you she's interested in; who is not the guy who has shown that he liked her also; who barely has more than a social relationship with her then waltzes in and asks her to marry him and she enthusiastically accepts because of course she loved him too. what?! The reader is not invested in that relationship at all. We've been given nothing to engage with them in any way. He just appears and they walk off into the sunset together. I don't buy it and I don't like you trying to sell it to me.

Mostly it was a not entirely fascinating book that contained a very intriguing world.