Glamourist Histories, book 4
Valour and Vanity
Mary Robinette Kowal
ISBN: 9780765334169
Jane and Vincent are off again, this time to Venice, to explore the potential of their glass-working magics.
Will their vacation go more smoothly than their last? Nope! Still, this is more of a caper than the miserable slog of summerless London. Jane's hypochondriac mother is hesitant to let them depart from the family caravan through Europe - she's afraid that pirates will harm them on their way to Venice.
Pirates are a rarity, and the duo laugh them off, until their ferry is boarded and they, along with the other passengers, lose everything they own. They fall in with a kindly older local gentleman, who takes them under his wing while they attempt to recover from the attack and move on with their plans, but the plot thickens, and soon they're reduced to living in a garret, penniless and adrift in a foreign land with hostile forces arrayed against them.
They'll need each other more than ever to win free of these entanglements, but can Vincent control his pride and shame? Will Jane trust his strength when she needs it?
Once more, there's a certain Doctor on the premises, and those scenes add a welcome lightness to the plot. Kowal seems to take a certain glee in tormenting her main characters, and Jane and Vincent are as beaten-down here as they ever have been in the past. They'll have to be stronger, smarter, and trickier than ever, and I honestly worried in this book (for the first time in the series) that perhaps they wouldn't be up to the challenge. That's a good storyteller there.
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