Confessions of the Fox
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Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess were the most notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers of eighteenth-century London. Yet no one knows the true story; their confessions have never been found.
Until now. Reeling from heartbreak, a scholar named Dr. Voth discovers a long-lost manuscript—a gender-defying exposé of Jack and Bess’s adventures. Is Confessions of the Fox an authentic autobiography or a hoax? As Dr. Voth is drawn deeper into Jack and Bess’s tale of underworld resistance and gender transformation, it becomes clear that their fates are intertwined—and only a miracle will save them all.
Writing with the narrative mastery of Sarah Waters and the playful imagination of Nabokov, Jordy Rosenberg is an audacious storyteller of extraordinary talent.
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Confessions of the Fox is an #ownvoices novel - written by a trans author, about a trans professor writing about a manuscript about a trans eighteenth-century thief. In that way, it's quite unique, and valuable for its observations about being trans.
But story-wise - it drug on about a hundred pages too long, got bogged down by the footnotes that tell the professor's story, and ultimately went off on some conspiracy tangent that added nothing to the plot. It got weird. I think the book would have been better if it had just been Jack Sheppard's story, without the “professor-annotating-the-manuscript” framework built around it.
Jack is a very compelling character, but we keep getting distracted from his story by the professor's career and love life problems, so it feels very fragmented. I did enjoy the colorful, metaphorical language constantly being used to talk about sex, though! Make no mistake, this is a dirty book. It's mostly dirty in the most flowery of terms, so it's more entertaining than titillating, but it's something to keep in mind if you're thinking of gifting it to someone!
Ultimately, I wish I'd skipped it. I know there are people that like the book-within-a-book framework, and I do sometimes, but I feel like it distracted from the story I really wanted to read, here.
You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.
