Curtsies & Consequences by Melissa ConstantineMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I generally avoid books that offer me a princess character, and when this book starts, Kira, the female lead, is an example of why I do that. She's petulant, rude, immature, entitled, and convinced that, despite all of this, she should have been allowed to accede to the throne in advance of her 21st birthday, rather than being placed under the regency of her stepmother (who everyone else sees as much more competent, with good reason).
Yes, there is a regency in this book, though it's not, as the form of the title suggests, a Regency book. The setting is a mostly generic fantasy world with a late-medieval feel, although also with some random anachronistic features like chocolate bars with gold-coloured foil, an icebox, and someone referred to as being "gun-shy," though we don't see any guns. We also get the word "Muppets" dropped at one point. Unfortunately, given the prevalence of aristocratic characters, the author makes some basic blunders in terminology, referring to the queen as "Her Highness" (the correct title being "Her Majesty") and sometimes having the male lead addressing the princess as "My Lady," inaccurately calling all nobles "royals" (only the monarch and their immediate family are royal), and referring to all noble territories as "kingdoms". Only a territory ruled by a king is a kingdom; one ruled by a prince is a principality, and one ruled by a duke is a duchy, so the so-called "Known Kingdoms" are, in fact, a single kingdom. She also (like a lot of fantasy authors) doesn't seem to know that a league is, by definition, the distance one can travel in an hour, so it's not possible for someone who started out maybe half an hour before you to be several leagues away, no matter how fast he rides.
Sadly, the ignorance doesn't stop there; there are also dozens of mechanical and vocabulary errors. Far too frequently, a sentence will make no grammatical sense at all, because there are whole phrases missing or a verb in completely the wrong tense, or maybe a word that's not even the right part of speech, or the wrong preposition, or a key word that appears to be chosen almost at random and have nothing to do with the intended meaning. For example, at one point a character is told "She has assured me you are quite revenant and I am not to fear from you." Apart from the odd phrasing "not to fear from you," "revenant" is a noun, not an adjective, and refers to a kind of undead creature, which doesn't fit the context whatsoever. Sometimes I can guess which word was intended, but sometimes, as with "revenant," I have no clue. Other random words along this line include "erstwhile" (which few authors use correctly), "fissure," "fop," "fallacy," and "inert," none of which strike me as particularly obscure vocabulary.
And apart from the random vocabulary words, there are a lot of homonym or near-homonym errors, some extremely basic: advanced/advance, definitive/definite, sensibility/good sense, jam/jamb, envelope/envelop, creek/creak, steal/steel, hoard/horde, wrap/rap, sight/site, hearty/hardy, stripped/striped, tact/tack, tuffs/tufts, reigned/reined (and reigns/reins), scrapped/scraped, manor/manner, led/lead (and not the verb, either, which is easily confused; it's the metal), who's/whose, proceed/precede, Robot/Robert, repelling/repealing, check/cheek, laying/lying, legions/leagues, everyone/every one, rammed/crammed, ring/wring, ascent/assent, mele/melee, ascended/descended, outrange/outrage, and it's/its. Some are clearly just typos, but if there is a way to misspell a word, this author will unerringly find it. It makes me wonder whether she mainly reads via audiobook (and never sees words spelled) and/or uses dictation software and doesn't know enough to clean up the homonyms afterwards.
I could go on and on about the many, many issues: the misplaced apostrophes when the noun is plural or a proper name ending in S (at one point, we get "Mrs. Banes's, "Mrs. Banes'" and "Mrs. Bane's" all within a couple of pages, of which either of the first two is justifiable - but it should be consistent - and the third is completely wrong), the missing past perfect, every kind of missing or misused punctuation, including mispunctuated dialog, frequently missing or misplaced commas, nearly every error it's possible to commit with a quotation mark, missing question marks when the sentence is a question and a question mark where the sentence isn't a question, capitals for terms of address that aren't titles and for the cardinal directions, and hyphens where they shouldn't be... it's a mess. Simply throwing it into Google Docs, by the way, would go a long way in finding issues like this. I marked about 400 issues, which compares poorly with the usual couple of dozen I find in an average book.
It's not just the editing, either. Plot points are dropped without notice (there's a promise of a noble title - incorrectly described, of course, as a "royal" title - that's never followed up on). There's a Convenient Eavesdrop, my absolute least favourite plot device, though it ends up not being that significant. "Oak seeds" (which the author doesn't seem to know are called acorns) are used in a metaphor that involves them circling in the breeze like dancers; that's not something acorns do. We never get an explanation of why the spell spread to the orphans specifically, or why Xav is Robert's best friend given that they come from widely separated places. Even though the chapters are headed with the name of the point of view character, in one chapter it hops back and forth several times.
But what about the characters? There's a gay couple - same-sex relationships are not an issue in this setting, and apparently political alliance is more important than succession - who we're told are happy together, but what we're shown is that one doesn't understand the other at all, and they're frequently fighting in an immature way; one is described as "kind," though I never saw him do anything kind, and several times saw him do something unkind. But they're not the main couple in the book. The main couple is the awful Princess Kira, whose only positive quality seems to be that she's beautiful, and the unfortunate Sir Robert, to whom I was metaphorically shouting, "Do not engage! I repeat, do not engage!" every time she came near him. I was actively rooting for his childhood friend, the third leg of the rather half-hearted love triangle, even though she had no particular qualities other than not being Kira, and even though I know the childhood friend always loses. Seriously, Kira is the worst. It's true that she had a loveless upbringing, and she is fairly nice to children, but... she's every negative thing I mean when I call someone a princess, and I was deeply sorry for Sir Robert, forced by the plot to be her partner against his better judgement.
A woman whose mother has been persistently not listening to her and is trying to marry her off for political reasons to a drunkard tells her "You're the best mother in the entire world." I worry for the author, I really do.
Fortunately, and to my surprise, Kira does get a character arc, which went some way to redeeming her in my eyes. She still toxically misinterprets what Robert says and leaves him wondering what he's done wrong, so it's still an unhealthy relationship, but at least she sees some of her most egregious flaws and commits to working on them. He's still in for a world of pain, poor sap.
I picked this up (via Netgalley), despite the presence of a princess, because the blurb sounded intriguing. I kept reading past the middle largely to see if I'd correctly guessed the identity of the main antagonist (I had not; (view spoiler)). It wasn't without its positives, notably the character arc of the initially awful female lead (who still has significant issues by the end, but at least is addressing some of them). I considered putting it on the lowest level of my annual recommendation list, which is where I've put books with sound storytelling but bad editing before.
This isn't just badly edited, though. It's inept sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility, and absolutely not ready for publication; it would take, I estimate, a month's solid work by someone skilled to even get close. As always, I feel bound to note that the books I get from Netgalley may, theoretically, receive more editing after I see them and before publication, but this one has so many issues that there's no way it can be fixed in the time, so I'm giving it my "seriously-needs-editing" tag in the confidence that it will still seriously need editing when it's published a couple of weeks from now. Taking that into account, it gets three stars, and lucky to have the third one.
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