Melissa McShane

The writing in this book seems to try to encapsulate the feeling of Jane Austen's writing and it does a pretty good job at that but the plot is not at all what I expected from the writing style.
To a large degree, the book is just a female empowerment fantasy and is a bit too blunt about this in a few places. Because the MC is so capable and powerful the author struggles a bit with creating credible and tense conflict.
The pacing is almost too even imo. It's not too slow overall but it doesn't adjust to the tension of the story in some places so some things feel a bit drawn out while others move too fast.
If you enjoy writing similar to Jane Austen you will probably enjoy this too even though it is much more fantastical and has a lot more action and violence than I expected.… (mer)

This was quite an interesting book! At first I was a little reluctant to the main-character-who-is-both-a-countess-and-a-librarian idea but I actually ended up liking it! Putting the story in a medieval-ish settings but with modern inventions (called "Devices") was also a pretty neat idea. There were still horse-drawn carriages but they also had some modern stuff, apparently, like humidifiers, guns, and even folding chairs!

Just a warning that there are quite a few suggestive comments (e.g. about women's breasts (mostly the MC's), crude joking, etc.), men often ogle and leer inappropriately at women, and in one scene a man and a woman are naked waist up and kiss passionately. One character has engaged in quite a bit of premarital sex before the book started but there aren't any sex scenes at all in the book itself and the character in question paid for his actions and is meant to have redeemed himself.

Overall, a well-written book with well-developed characters and some action mixed in. Wouldn't recommend to anyone under the age of 15 though, just to be safe.… (mer)

Zerafine, a priestess of Atenas, and her companion Gerrard, have been sent to the city of Portena to investigate spirits who don’t appear or behave like usual ghosts.

Initially I thought the worldbuilding could have been more effectively conveyed -- some concepts were confusingly left unexplained, and some conversations seemed too blatantly infodumpy. But I liked the characters and once I settled into the story, I enjoyed the mystery. If something else by McShane catches my attention and sounds like my sort of thing, I’d read it.… (mer)