When I read Point of Honour by Madeleine Robins, I am reading a mystery novel; others are reading a novel of alternate history about a woman P.I.
I feel strange admitting this, since it's such a subtle, nebulous thing, but the friend who told me I should read Point of Honour just said, "It's a Regency mystery." So I wasn't expecting the alternate history element, and it threw me out of the story, because I'd been looking forward to a mystery set either in the author's best approximation of the actual historical period, or else the consensus frothy alterna-Regency many romances are set in. I need to go back and try it again, because I could tell it was well-written--it just wasn't what I was expecting to read.
Which I guess just goes to show genre is all about expectations--if I'd known going in that I was reading a genre-bender instead of a straightforward historical mystery, I'd have responded differently to the book. And that's probably a cautionary tale for an aspiring genre-bender like me (I'm somewhere on the border between historical romance, historical fiction, and the military historical).
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Date: 2006-03-17 07:37 pm (UTC)I feel strange admitting this, since it's such a subtle, nebulous thing, but the friend who told me I should read Point of Honour just said, "It's a Regency mystery." So I wasn't expecting the alternate history element, and it threw me out of the story, because I'd been looking forward to a mystery set either in the author's best approximation of the actual historical period, or else the consensus frothy alterna-Regency many romances are set in. I need to go back and try it again, because I could tell it was well-written--it just wasn't what I was expecting to read.
Which I guess just goes to show genre is all about expectations--if I'd known going in that I was reading a genre-bender instead of a straightforward historical mystery, I'd have responded differently to the book. And that's probably a cautionary tale for an aspiring genre-bender like me (I'm somewhere on the border between historical romance, historical fiction, and the military historical).