Review: Ten Thousand Stitches

Ten Thousand Stitches by Olivia Atwater
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like the previous book in the series, this makes my 2021 Best-Of list. It's a well-handled, well-paced fantasy Regency romance, with an atypical (for Regency romance) focus on the folk "below stairs". In fact, this and its predecessor have a very strong streak of anger against the injustices perpetrated by the privileged on the less powerful.

The protagonist is a maid in a household where the Family give no consideration to the humanity of the staff, but overwork them shamelessly (it eventually emerges that the understaffing is because they have laid people off in an effort to deal with financial troubles, but they still expect the same amount of work from a smaller workforce, a story familiar to many people who have worked in the modern corporate world).

One of the things I like about the series is that the heroes and heroines are not the usual attractive, powerful, bland, generic people, but have flaws in their appearance and external circumstances that are more than made up for by their characters. A minor character, for example, is a gentleman who, while very ordinary in appearance, has a good heart. And the characters are not pushed back and forth passively by the whims of Fate (in the person of the author) either; they struggle and work for their resolutions. The magic is imaginative and original, Faery is appropriately odd and whimsical and slightly sinister, and it's as far as it could be from being made from box mix.

What lets it down a little is that the author has a couple of bad punctuation habits. She doesn't know when not to use a coordinate comma (when the adjectives couldn't reasonably appear in a different order), and often hyphenates adjectival and (even worse) adverbial phrases that should not be hyphenated. There are a few glaring Americanisms in the mouths of the supposedly English characters, too.

Those issues didn't mar my enjoyment too much, though; the storytelling craft is sound throughout, and I look forward to reading the next book in the series.

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