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

by Mary Robinette Kowal

[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.