A Dreadful Splendor

This book was an odd mixture of tropes that I'm personally already a bit sick of, but with a fairly compelling mystery at the back of it all. I did want to keep going and find out the solution to the mystery, but by the last quarter of the book I was starting to skim - a lot.

This book is chock full of tropes, but one of the most annoying of all is having an apparently 19th century heroine espouse 21st century values - all too common in this historical fiction genre nowadays, sadly. Genevieve grows up poor and struggling with her mom to put food in their mouths, which is why they began this business of being spiritualists to begin with. When she is basically thrown into the employ of Mr. Pemberton, Earl of Chadwick, and is invited to Somerset Park, his luxurious manor, Genevieve goes on a few tirades about how unfair it is that the privileged should have everything while there are so many who have nothing. Now, this sentiment isn't exactly nonexistent during the Victorian period, but it's clear that this was written with a very 21st century lens, which took me out of the story a bit. Granted that this isn't meant to be an incredibly accurate historical piece, but I just felt like it was shoved in there to soothe 21st century sensibilities about the very strong class hierarchy system in this setting without really giving it serious thought. Plus, the whole message is undermined by how the plot develops (true for this book, but also a trope across the whole hist-fic-romance genre as a whole): Genevieve supposedly laments about how unfair all this class system is, but in the end she falls in love with a rich, titled Earl and not only that, she comes into her own money and ends up a rich woman in her own right. So... it seems like you only need to be bitter about it when you're the one who's poor, but it's totally fine once you're in the position to reap the benefits of the very system that you apparently set yourself against all along. I also find that it really undermines the whole thing when you have a heroine who hates inequality but chooses to fall in love with a rich, titled man in the end, it'it's almost never someone from a lower socioeconomic status, or even if he is he wouldn't stay that way for the rest of the book.

At the very least though, this book stays away from some tropes that would've made me DNFed immediately, like insta-love/lust, or overexplaining the setting to the audience and being overly conscious about how “period” it is, so I could at least sit through the whole book. The mystery was really the saving grace through this book and was the one thing that kept me going. I didn't feel attached to any of the characters at all, but at least I also wasn't incredibly annoyed by any of them. For someone who grew up in a brothel, though, Genevieve is incredibly prejudiced against sex workers. I would have expected that she would at least have a more nuanced view, and understand the hardships that come with being one, and how most of them usually have no other choice. At the very least, she directed her anger to both the women plying it and the men demanding the trade, rather than just to women.

It was an overall serviceable time with a decent mystery at the heart of it all. I'd recommend if you're in the mood for Gothic murder mysteries and don't mind the tropes of contemporary hist-fic.