European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman

I cannot fully express how much I love the Athena Club. I can only say that I wish we had had such books when I was a kid -- perhaps I would not have felt so monstrous myself growing up, or at least not so alone.

This sequel picks up where its predecessor left off, which is to say a few months after a certain dramatic rescue and only a short while after the arrival of a certain mysterious telegram. Mysterious telegrams, in fact, abound in this particular volume, which finds our gang of monstrous females traveling not just around England, but all the way to Budapest in order to rescue a fellow experiment. Along the way, there are kidnappings and fires and plenty of snacks, just as anyone who has read the previous installment might show more expect.

The series carries on with its experiments in narrative style, with character intrusions and commentary in and on the narrative itself, often peppering humor and insight in with the plot twists. In this particular book, those insertions are often joking and unsubtle foreshadowing of the coming events, as well as the occasional breaking of tension. Nothing here is meant to be purely logical, so those who don't care for such interruptions may be better off with a more straightforward book, but those thinking of reading this probably already know what they're in for.

Indeed, those asides are indicative of the book's greater point: the emotional growth of our central characters and the development of their relationships as a club of young women in a world that too often underestimates and limits young women. The bonds between these characters are the most important part of the book; in reading their interactions, one does feel enveloped in the warmth of their emotions and, indeed, less alone than perhaps one did when one started.

Add to that the delicious period details, the familiar literary guest-stars, and the thoroughly modern attitude, and you have a book that speaks to my readerly soul. Seriously. I love all 700 pages of it. That's it and that's all. show less

As a rollicking adventure, romping across 1890s Europe to thwart exotic bad guys with the help of powerful, competent women who live locally in Vienna and Budapest and have extraordinary resources at their command, this succeeds very well.

There's lots of action and derring-do, all of which is very well described. We get to spend time in a lunatic asylum in England, in a lunatic asylum in Vienna, in a ruined castle in Styria and in a Baron's villa in Budapest. Along the way, we travel on the Orient Express, join the circus, have a firefight in a back alley, carry out three rescues from the clutches of villains and have a major, violent confrontation with the massed membership of the Alchemical Society.

Each member of the Athena Club show more gets to do something interesting and or dangerous. Some of them discover new abilities or new things about their history and all of them grow in confidence as they work together and the Club increases its membership. We meet several powerful, independent women who make common cause with the Athena Club. We also meet the woman heading the Alchemical Society, who turns out to be quite different from the egomaniacal men around her.

The characters of the members of the Athena Club are being nicely fleshed out now. Mary is opening up a bit and Alice is moving out of the shadows. Dianna remains her unrepentant self. Her uninhibited energy made me laugh several times. Catherine is more puma in this book than the last and all the better for it.

There is also some excellent prose in the book. Here's an example. Cat has just asked Martin the Marvelous Mesmerist if mesmerism is real. He admits that some of the show is for effect but says that the "mesmerical waves" are real. I love this description:
"...when I was a child, I could sense them all around me—like we were all living in the ocean, under water, but only I knew we were wet.”
That's a powerful description of what it feels like to see things differently than the people around you.

All in all, this book was a lot of fun.

It just wasn't as much fun as the first book "The Strange Case Of The Alchemist's Daughter".

I know all second books in a trilogy face the challenge of not being as novel as the first book and not having the finality of the last but my enjoyment of this book was weakened by small things that might easily have been fixed.

The opening of the book was clumsy. About half of the first two hours of this twenty-four hours and twenty-seven minutes long could have been left out if Theodora Goss had assumed that I'd had the wit to read the series in sequence and that I had not so poor a memory that I needed to be reminded of the backstory of every member of the Athena Club and a recap on the plot of the first novel.

She did gloss the recaps with some humour, showing at least that's she's aware of how clumsy a start this is but, given how bold and innovative the writing style of the first novel was - it adopted a novel form and made no concessions to readers who might not be fully awake - it was a disappointing start. 'm a little disappointed.

Another niggle was that the members of the Athena Club kept using American conventions to describe the layout of buildings. In Europe, the first floor is the one above the ground floor. Mary et. al. would take this for granted so I was quite confused when they used the American convention, making the first floor the second floor.

There was also a surprising anachronism. At one point in an account to the Athena Club, Cats says:
In Clerkenwell, a woman selling newspapers and cheap paperbacks from a stall was able to direct them to Mrs. Protheroe’s boardinghouse,
The book is set in the 1890's. Paperbacks didn't appear until the 1930s. Even the Yellowbacks that W H Smith's sold at railway stations didn't appear until the next century.

I was also that I ended up returning the audiobook and moving to the ebook version. This is not something I do often but I was losing patience with Kate Reading's narration. This is disappointing as I'd enjoyed her narration of the first book. This time, her reading kept falling into a rhythm that provided variation but often put stresses in strange places, especially when there was no direct speech. It turned out that the ebook version is clear and easy to follow. I think I'll stick with this format for the final book of the series.

Despite the niggles, I had fun with the book and I like the characters so the final book in the series, "The Sinister Mystery Of The Mesmerising Girl" is already in my TBR pile. show less

Really loved this sequel -- glad to see the delightful and powerful ladies of the Athena Club return, and still find both their aside squabbles and their personalities to be deeply amusing. I kind of love that the sequel continues the collector's tradition of the first book. In addition to all our usual ladies, they are now on a quest to rescue Lucinda Van Helsing -- some unexpected allies come to their aid and provide yet more interesting tie-ins to the literary canon. Love it.

Some things I were different -- Mary! Resume your confidence! I think you will need it. And Can't Diana pleeeeease have a puppy? Hoho seems like an excellent addition, is all I'm saying. Really looking forward to the next book.

Some specific feedback about the show more ARC (late, I fear) -- it is an enormous book, and some of the asides could be pared back without sacrificing much -- in particular, Diana's continual brattiness gets a little repetitive in the asides, since it is also abundantly present in the narrative. Since that is ARC commentary, I'm not sure it's relevant to the published book, as it may have been edited further. Advanced reader's copy provided by Edelweiss. show less

This is a very comfortable and comforting read, assuming:

A: You're a big fan of all the classic Victorian (or nearby) Horrors, SFs and Fantasies of the day.

B: You love it when minor female characters get catapulted into the limelight in frankly feminist adventures with cultured justice in mind.

C: You love roadtrip novels.


Me? I love roadtrip novels of all kinds. We even got an actual horseless carriage in this one! But mostly it was trains (Orient express!), back-country inns, and a full European vacation package.

The tangential tellings of these women's stories are delightful. And a lot less tragic. And they no longer resemble cardboard cut-outs of people! Yay!

For the literary part of me, I chortled at all the new or recurring show more character references. Now including a much wider cast of Dracula!


One thing I ought to mention: this is a very long novel, and while I really loved nursing a baby vampire back to sanity and enjoyed the final plot resolution a great deal, the real core of this novel is all about the JOURNEY. Like any kind of roadtrip novel. :) I took it easy and enjoyed all the sights, smells, and the spilling of blood. show less

To be blunt, this was a chore. Though the premise was intriguing–the female children of some of book-history’s most villainous men come together as a Society–the execution made it an exercise in perseverance.

But that core idea–so clever! Take the idea of female=uncontrolled=wild=nature=monster, band them together, give them a mission, and surround them with both real and literary figures. But there’s a constant interruption of meta elements, which proves tiresome. The story is ostensibly written by Catherine, one of the young women, as a means of earning money for the group. It is frequently interrupted with discussions among the characters about how they might be portrayed, or objections to what is being shared. Vaguely show more amusing at the start, it becomes significantly less so the fourth or fifth time it happens. By the time we reach the penultimate scenes, it’s annoying.

“DIANA: I wasn’t petulant! I’m never petulant. What does that mean, anyway? I think you made that word up. Are writers allowed to do that?

MARY: I am certainly perturbable! Catherine, you’re describing me as though I were some sort of female Sherlock Holmes, which I am not, thank you very much.

DIANA: That’s not such a bad comparison, actually. You’re as annoying as he is.'

Justine was sitting on the carpet. All our chairs, she said, made her feel as though she were folding up like an accordion. And Catherine, your author, was standing next to the fireplace, leaning on the mantle, looking particularly jaunty in a man's suit.”

Even more significantly, the pace is wildly uneven, veering back and forth between action and florid detail of who was thinking what, at what time. While the action merits some attention, there’s a level of detail that is truly unnecessary. For instance, take the appearance of a dog whistle:

“It is a common dog whistle,’ said Beatrice. ‘I borrowed it from the Count’s groom, who uses it to signal the wolfdogs. They were first invented by Sir Francis Galton to determine the range of hearing in human beings and animals. Human ears cannot hear it–as the rest of you saw, Mary was not affected at all. But those of a dog can–or a cat, or a vampire. A cat can hear sounds higher than a dog, and a vampire, I conjecture, can hear even higher. We can use it to distract and disable [redacted]. But those of you with particularly acute hearing will have to carry India-rubber earplugs to protect yourself from its sound.”

And this is why it’s a 700 page book: there’s two (plus) extra sentences for every paragraph. Yikes. Trying to pick my words carefully here, I’d say that this might appeal to the sort of reader that likes a lot of detail but minimum effort. But what about the clever allusions, the reviewer wonders? Doesn’t Goss introduces us to a historical figure that provides a bit of free psychological profiling of two of our heroines? Doesn’t that require inference? Oh, but the conclusions are spelled out shortly after, reader, when one of the other characters clarifies it. It’s like that all the way through, and I think that, in part, accounts for a lot of the feeling of disinterest.

What’s good? Goss is not incompetent with her words. The setting was well-realized. A fair amount of things happen, so despite the leisurely pace, it’s not precisely boring. I still love the concept, and the idea of these young women growing in their self-knowledge and owning their own power is a fabulous idea, especially as they band together to rescue other young women like themselves. I like the idea of ‘science’ playing a role. There’s a fair amount of diversity, and attention to class differences. If you can let go of the meta, it’s kind of fun to have guest appearances from famous historical figures brought into the story.

I’d say it’s boilerplate 1890s-ish supernatural with two things setting it apart. One, Girrrl-Power, which is done in an attractive way (although worth knowing that they need resources from other people, both male and female). Two, the idea that Dr. Moreau, Dr. Hyde, Van Helsing and many others are all members of an Alchemical Society that is dedicated to advancing knowledge and mankind through ‘scientific principles.’ ?

Still, there’s no excuse for 700 pages, unless Goss was trying to write Jonathan Strange for the young/new-adult set? Now that I think about it…

Two and a half monsters. show less

I enjoyed the first book of this series enough to pick up the second book… And, yes, it’s more of the same. Having said that, the central conceit does seem to be wearing a bit thin, and even though Goss has been hard at work roping in all manner of characters from Victorian horror fiction, she’s rung so many changes on them they might as well have been invented by her in the first place. In summary: in The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, Mary Jekyll brought about the creation of the Athena Club – Diana Hyde, Justina Frankenstein, Catherine Moreau, Beatrice Rappaccini, plus housekeeper Mrs Poole and maid Alice – while assisting Sherlock Holmes solve a series of murders in Whitechapel… which ended up being linked show more to Adam Frankenstein (ie, the Monster) and the Society of Alchemists. In this second book, Mary’s old governess, Mina Harker (yes, that Mina Harker), asks for help to rescue Van Helsing’s daughter (yes, that Van Helsing and, er, his daughter) from a Viennese asylum, where she has been incarcerated after an experiment to turn her into a vampire. It’s all because Van Helsing and his cronies want to seize power in the Society of Alchemists – current president: She, AKA Ayesha – because their experiments in transmutation have been banned. The Athena Cub end up fighting Van Helsing et al. With the help of Count Dracula. Who is a good guy. I love the conceit, and Goss handles it marvellously. She drags in Victorian monsters willy-nilly and then gives them a place in the setting which fits perfectly. The way the narrative is interrupted by conversation between the characters, who explicitly refer to the narrative as a narrative – is cleverly done. But. The prose is all so very light and commercial, and at 720 pages this story is too long. Goss can write, I know she can because I’ve read some of her short fiction. But European Travels for the Monstrous Gentlewoman reads like an airport bestseller or a book to read on a train journey. The prose doesn’t try hard at all. I like the characters and I like the story, but this novel could have been so much better. I hope the third book in the series remembers that picking the right words and putting them in the right order is as important as telling the story. show less

All of the women from the first book have settled into Mary Jeckyll's house and things are peaceful until she gets a telegram from her former governess Mina Murray to as for assistance as Lucinda Von Helsing has been kidnapped. The Athena Club travel to the Astro Hungarian empire to help and there encounter Irene Adler and other characters from stories.
Sometimes it feels like a romp through characters of fiction but it was also a love letter to several neglected characters of fiction. It's apparent that Theodora Goss is a lover of historical fiction and is interested in playing around with the female bit-part characters and giving them their own space and stories to flesh out the shadows they are in stories.
It was interesting and I had show more fun and I am looking forwards to more in this series. And possibly reading or re-reading some of the stories this is based on. show less