Whitley’s review of The Betrayal of the Blood Lily (Pink Carnation #6) by Lauren Willig

Whisked away to nineteenth-century India, Penelope Deveraux plunges into the court intrigues of the Nizam of Hyderabad, where no one is quite what they seem. New to this strange and exotic country- where a dangerous spy called the Marigold leaves venomous cobras as his calling card- she can trust only one man: Captain Alex Reid.

With danger looming from local warlords, treacherous court officials, and French spies, Alex and Penelope may be all that stand in the way of a plot designed to rock the very foundations of the British Empire…

When I was deployed overseas in the army, the bases there had this bizarre quirk of trying to be as American as possible, even in the middle of an Iraqi desert.  Everything was American.  We were Americans, surrounded by other Americans, surrounded by American stuff, all in an effort to ignore the fact that that we weren’t in America.  We even had a Burger King (though it tasted funny and we joked that they must be serving us camel). The only locals we encountered were isolated and, 90% of the time, trying to sell us some kitschy stuff.

Reading Betrayal of the Blood Lily was much the same experience, but with Regency England and India.  And, you know, no bombs. The whole thing could have been set in England with very little change in more than the physical scenery, but on the other hand, it was supposed to be that way.  If you want to read a book that’s “in” India, this isn’t going to scratch your itch.  But if you want to read a book that’s got a really strange England-in-India and has fun with that, a-okay.

I enjoyed the plot of this book, though at times I felt a bit lost because I didn’t grasp a lot of the context.  There were a lot of characters, and when they reappeared 100 pages after their first introduction, we didn’t get any sort of recap on who they were.  Plus there was some stuff that just didn’t get explained very well to a reader who knows little of that time period.  But the writing was good enough to carry me through, and I enjoyed the witty dialogue and the characters. I enjoyed Penelope’s struggles in a bad marriage and falling for another man, and I really enjoyed the nuance in that.  Her husband wasn’t just uniformly bad and she didn’t uniformly hate him, there was some actual emotional confusion in the mix.

One thing I really didn’t get, though, was Penelope’s involvement in the spy stuff.  Which is to say, Penelope wasn’t involved in the spy stuff.  Occasionally she got curious enough to ask random questions, but it always felt like she was just doing it out of curiosity, never for a legitimate reason, and the vast majority of it would have played out the same way without her there.  Also, I wasn’t fond of the framing device used in this book.  There’s a side-story of a modern-day researcher learning about Penelope’s story and relating it to us, while having her own romance troubles, but those sections were so short that I couldn’t get invested and mostly I was just annoyed that they took me away from the main plot.

Rating: 4 out of 5

This book is available from NAL Trade.  You can purchase it here or here in e-format.