B+
Title: Highest Stakes
Author: Emery Lee
Publication Info: Sourcebooks 2010
ISBN: 978-1402236426
Genre: Historical: European
It was a Kindle freebie on Amazon. It was published last year, so it’s not totally new, but it’s not old school, either. But I have words.
I’m finding a whole bunch of “not the usual Old West or Regency England or Victorian England setting” and this one is no different. It starts around 1742 in England- there are several background historical that inform the action and the author does a really good job of tying these in to the reality and the motivation of the characters.
First is the house of Hanover and the succession crisis that brought the Germans to the throne of England. (Thumbnail: Queen Anne didn’t have a living male heir, and Parliament passed the Act of Settlement of 1701 that settled the throne on the Electress of Hanover, who was a granddaughter of James I, which passed to her son George I by the time Anne died.) France is squabbling with Austria (as you do) and the King sends the Army to “help” (but is really just trying to protect the Hanoverian holdings).
Consequently, the House of Stuart and the Jacobean uprising of 1715 and 1745 come in to play, too. There are a number of people who quietly support Bonnie Prince Charles, or at least think the Stuarts are at least more English than the German House of Hanover.
So that’s the political context. The social context surrounds horse racing. (PONIES) At this point, the English have developed a strong racing tradition (Sport of Kings, and all that). If you’ve ever read King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry (and WHY HAVE YOU NOT) that gives the background to one of the three foundation stallions and the basic gist behind some of the breeding issues. (Horse-breeding issues. There are people-breeding issues, too, but we will get to that.) Also it’s really good.
So our hero is Robert Devington, who starts out his journey as a groom in Sir Garfield L’s stud. Our heroine, Charlotte, is Sir Garfield’s niece and ward. She comes into the family after her parents died (as parents in these stories are wont to do), and Sir Garfield is one of those annoying, absent, snotty guardians (as guardians in these stories are wont to do). His head groom sees a kindred spirit in Charlotte, and teaches her how to ride- eventually letting her help train the babies. She loves it, and is fearless, and has a good rapport with the horses, especially a broodmare named Amoret (as girls in these stories are wont to do).
Our story opens with a race- Sir Garfield’s son is supposed to ride, but is detained by a broken carriage. As the jockeys for this race are only supposed to be gentlemen, Robert shouldn’t be able to ride, but he bluffs his way in by saying he’s engaged to Charlotte. The race officials buy his story, he wins, Sir Garfield is happy to have made a SHITTON of money by selling the horse to the King of France, and Robert tries to convince Sir Garfield to make the fake engagement a real one (Charlotte is totally down with this plan).
Sir Garfield started off as a tradesman, and bought his way into a baronetcy, and in the way of nouveau riche, NOT willing to marry his ward off to a groom. His social mobility trajectory is up, not down. So Robert joins the Horse Guards to make his fortune (as stableboys in his position are wont to do).
He does fine, and ends up in possession of a warhorse he names Mars- the stallion is irredeemable, except Robert uses a bit of natural horsemanship (this was the point I knew the author really researched, and was a horse person, because no one but a horse person would give a crap about what this means) to convince Mars that life doesn’t blow when you have a job to do. Robert makes it back from the wars a captain. He’s hoping that being a captain would convince Sir Garfield that he’s an acceptable suitor for Charlotte.
It doesn’t work of course. An officer in the army still doesn’t meet Garfield’s definiton of upward mobility. Instead, he’s looking for landed peers that need money for Charlotte and his daughter, Beatrix.
Robert has met his heterosexual life-partner in the wars- Phillip Drake, the second son of the Earl of Hastings. The Earl of Hastings is dying, and his oldest son and heir, Edmund, is unmarried and not showing a great deal of interest in doing so. Also he is a tool. The old Earl tells his son and heir that hes a tool, and the terms of the will have been changed- if he doesn’t produce an heir within a year of the Earl’s death, Edmund will lose the title, and it’ll all pass to Phillip.
So Robert and Phillip head to the home of Sir Garfield, and Robert and Charlotte are thrilled to see each other other, and Phillip and Beatrix start off a kind of annoying round of Slap Slap Kiss (she decides she needs to get revenge on him for some imagined slight, and it ends with her going to his room in her nightie, and, well, fade to black). Naturally, because she can’t get away with anything, she gets pregnant and blackmails daddy into letting her marry Phillip.
Sir Garfield has decided that Edmund will do for a husband for Charlotte, who decides to run away to Gretna Green with Robert. Phillip agrees to cover for them, and a plot is hatched to keep everyone from knowing that the two crazy kids ran off. The plot fails, Phillip is sent after them, which he reluctantly agrees to. If he doesn’t bring Charlotte back, he doesn’t get to marry Beatrix.
So Charlotte and Robert have about 12 hours lead time to get 300 some odd miles, on horseback, from London to Gretna Green. (And finally, after years of reading romances, I finally looked up why Gretna Green was the go-to place for runaway marriages. Answer (in case anyone is as dumb as I am): it’s right over the border to Scotland, and Scots law on marriage allowed a woman of 12 and a boy of 14 to marry without parental consent, rather than 21, which was the age in England. So now you know.)
They make it only about halfway before Phillip catches up with them, and the shit really hits the fan. Robert and Charlotte both think Phillip has totally betrayed them, Phillip is just trying to do his best, there’s a duel (of course), and Robert loses, badly. But they’re both officers in the Army, and dueling is against the rules, especially in a time of war. So off to the stockade they go.
Edmund has discovered that his bride-to-be has run off, which pisses him off no end, and he also discovers that his brother’s fiancée is pregnant. So he declares Beatrix to be an acceptable substitute, and marries her. Phillip is given Charlotte to marry (who hates this idea with flames on the side of her face), and Robert is transported to the Colonies (Charlotte is told he is hanged for his crime of dueling).
Now, the best description of story structure I’ve ever heard was Cleolinda on a Made of Fail podcast, quoting who she thinks may have Billy Wilder that, in Act One, you put your hero in a tree, Act Two, you set the tree on fire and in Act Three, you get them out of the tree.
Our heroes are in a lot of trees, and they are well and truly on fire. This is where Lee kind of falls down. The last third of the book is really rushed- you have a lot of stuff happening off-stage, and plot points I expected the play into the resolution are dismissed with barely a mention. By the end, it really felt like she said, “uhhhhh, yeah, you’re all out of trees, enjoy your lives!”
It’s a romance, and you expect a HEA, and I don’t think it’s spoiling to say you get one ….kind of… but it’s contrived. During the book club discussion of Unveiled, I said that I had no idea how Milan was going to resolve the conflict, and it was exciting. In Highest Stakes, I had no idea how the conflict was going to be resolved, and it was kind of a mess. I feel like the end was either a “oh crap, this is getting to be kind of long, I better end it!” or “oh crap! My deadline is approaching, I better end it!” We get through 8 years and a lot of stuff in maybe 50 pages.
The main conflict could have been resolved if people actually listened to each other. I know Robert is angry about all the shit that keeps landing on his head, and justifiably so, but still. Even if he’d let Charlotte explain WHY she had to marry Phillip (that or turned out on the street with no money, no protection, no nothing), maybe a little bit of heartache could have been avoided. But no. Lee ups the ante by having no one listen to anything anyone else is saying.
I am pretty certain this is a first novel, and there’s a little bit of first-novel-itis that I feel very confident she can overcome. A little bit more telling than showing, some awkward phrasing, and a fairly characture-ish villain (violent and gay- unfortunate implications, sadly).
But there’s a lot more that I really liked about this than I disliked. First, Lee does her homework. She set up the historical context really well, and the concern of the country over the lack of male heir of Queen Anne is reflected by Edmund’s desire to get a male heir. I liked how she drew the parallels between the concerns, and the conflict between Hanovers and Stuarts is sort of reflected in the conflict between Phillip and Edmund and who gets to be the Earl of Hastings.
Also, she does a few of the best infodumps I’ve ever read. When Charlotte is introduced to the horse world, the head groom at her uncle’s stud explains the differences on conformation and why that’s important in breeding and in what job a horse is given. Cart horses have a certain build, race horses have another. I know all of this, and I wasn’t bored by it, and I feel like someone who doesn’t know all this would follow it. It’s an adult explaining to a child, so it isn’t overly technical, and the dialogue is realistic. There’s a few other infodumps that explain the history of racing and the main stallions of the English turf and the theories of breeding race horses- again, well done. She’s a horse person. She can’t not be.
All in all, I did enjoy this book very much and really hope to see more from Lee. (ETA: According to Goodreads, she’s got a few more books coming down the pipe in the same era. YAY!) The issues will, I expect and hope, resolve themselves with more writing, and I love seeing someone who can research and apply that research well. (Seriously, her bibliography is pages long- all good stuff. I love it when authors include their sources. LOVE IT.)
ALSO PONIES
Dammit … your, Ms. Michaels, YOUR … not you’re. See how I am still rattled over those book??
WV: Covered 36. Yup, I could easily cover 36 ways these books were oh, so wrong.
@RHG – I second the Dick Francis recommendation, especially his older work. He was a steeplechase jockey, Champion Jockey at least once, rode horses belonging to the Queen and Queen Mother. When he retired from racing, he was given a courtesy job of writing for one of the newspapers. Turns out he could write – who knew? and went on to a successful career as a fiction writer. Still writing. I like his earlier work better than the later stuff, but it all involves horses in one way or another. The earlier stuff is very horse heavy, with lots of insight into the jockey’s mind and the world of racing. The books are classed as mysteries, but there’ s usually a bit of romance as well.
Well, right up to the end, anyway. Dick Francis died in February 2010, at the age of 90. He stopped writing for a few years in his early 80s after his wife’s death, and his last four books were co-authored with one of his sons, Felix Francis.
He was an exceptional writer of his kind. His heroes are all of a similar type: rather quiet and self-deprecating, possessed of mental determination, skill in and commitment to their profession (which is sometimes, though by no means always, that of a steeplechase jockey) and outstanding physical courage; they are almost invariably underestimated, misunderstood or falsely accused of some fault or weakness by colleagues or the public. He also has a splendid line in really horrible villains, who almost invariably get their comeuppance in some thoroughly satisfactory way.
There is a good deal of pretty graphic violence in many of the books, but there is, indeed, also love and romance in some.
I regard Dick Francis as one of the finest 20thC writers of popular fiction. Most of his books (or possibly all — I haven’t read every single one) are written in first-person POV, by the way. I know many of you hate first-person, but this is because it is very difficult to do well, so that many 1st-person stories are disappointing. When it is done well, as it was by Francis or by Mary Stewart, it works brilliantly, creating a freshness of tension, immediacy and excitement in a way that is quite different from limited 3rd-person.
@AGTigress – Dick Frances is also a great example of the type of infodump you referenced. I learned something with just about every one of his books. If it wasn’t horses and racing, it was glass blowing or precious gems or photography.
I loved all his heroes. Clever, stubborn men of honor who refused to be bullied. I deeply regret his loss.
Some of my favorite authors have died recently. I didn’t know that Dick Francis was among them. Judith Merkle Riley and Arianna Franklin also have written their last works. I’m glad Francis left behind such a large body of work to be enjoyed. The other two left only a few books of historical fiction, and I will miss them all.
I knew that Francis’ wife had died and that he was writing with his son. I also learned something from every book, whether it was horse transport, racetrack catering, or flying. Prior to reading Francis I didn’t know that some jockeys prefer champagne to food and refuse to have sex the night before a race. I loved Sid Halley, one of his early characters and admired his strength and courage.
He will be missed.
(Carolyn):
(Literary Slut Kilian):
Absolutely. This kind of well-researched detail was typical of his books, and it was also a major part of the pleasure of reading them.
To me, it seems facile to say that ‘too much information’ is bad, or ‘first person point of view’, or ‘the author’s voice intruding’ on the story: these things are not good or bad in themselves. They can be done well or badly, and furthermore, different readers have different tastes, so not everyone will like them even if they are done with skill. But Dick Francis is an ideal example to quote against those who regard ‘infodump’ and 1st-person as no-nos: his writing was readable, lively and gripping, and his books remain immensely, and deservedly, popular.
RHG, your reviews never fail to make me giggle. (As girls are wont to do.) Thanks for sharing.
RE: Horse books – you can’t go wrong with Judith Tarr (who breeds a Lipizzan herd in Arizona), really, but she doesn’t always have horses as the focus of her books – hmm, the most horse-focussy books are probably her Caitlin Brennan ones – she had her Lipizzans and their dressage be the magic in her trilogy for Luna Books – and recently she’s done another YA Caitling Brennan focussing on horses – House of the Star. The book trailer is a video of her herd of horses, actually.
She’s also written the non-fiction Writing Horses for writers, based on her series of blog posts at BVC.
Oh right, and then there’s still her A Wind in Cairo from the 80s, which has a sort of 1001 Nights/Crusades feel to it: a young man gets deservedly cursed to become an Arabian stallion and learns real love and real discipline at the hands of his eventual owner, a young woman of good breeding.
But really, even outside all the horses, you can’t go wrong with Judith Tarr fantasy.
Wow, this discussion is bringing back the memories. Dick Francis’ books were among the first “adult” books I read as a youngish teen and they’re among the few that I still like as an adult. He’s also the only author that everyone in my immediate family agreed on.
A couple recent discussions here got me remembering some of the terrible books I read and loved as a teen – like, um Friday and the Thomas Covenant series (gah!). Thank goodness for DF for providing a palette cleanser and a much saner and healthier view of human sexuality and relationships in general.