Of Noble Family is the final book in the Glamourist Histories series books by Mary Robinette Kowal. The first book, Shades of Milk and Honey ( A | BN | K | G | AB | Au | Scribd ), was a Jane Austen-style romance with a touch of fantasy. Subsequent books have been more focused on action and intrigue, but the focus on the main characters Jane and Vincent gives every book a strong romantic element. They are established as a couple, but seeing their marriage grow stronger in every book is as compelling as the courtship narrative of the first book.

In Of Noble Family, Vincent hears that his abusive father has died, and his older brother is unable to go to the estate in the West Indies to settle affairs. So Jane and Vincent go to the West Indies to the father’s planation, where they find that everything is as awful as anyone familiar with the history of the West Indies might expect. Jane and Vincent were abolitionists in England (fun fact – so was Jane Austen in real life) but they have never been face-to-face with the reality of slavery before.

For various reasons, Vincent and Jane can’t leave, and their situation grows more and more desperate as they try to at the very least improve conditions on the estate while avoiding being drawn into various evil intrigues.

The series is historical, with one element of fantasy. Some people have the ability to work glamour – various forms of illusion, mostly visual. Generally glamour is used to create decorations or other amusements, but in the course of the series Vincent and Jane discover ways to use glamour in espionage and politics as well. It seems that most people can perform some glamour, but some people, like Jane and Vincent, have a particular aptitude for it. One of the cool things about Of Noble Family is discovering that glamour is used all over the world, and that different cultures have different methods of using glamour and different ways of thinking about it. It’s fun to see the world-building leap forward so late in the game in such a natural way.

Let us pause and admire the cover. Mary Robinette Kowal requested that a black woman be on the cover, and she sewed the dress the model is wearing herself, by hand (details here). Jane and Vincent are the nominal heroes of the story, just like they have been in the rest of the series, but the cover is a nice reminder that ultimately, what happens in the West Indies is not really about Jane and Vincent.

I was so pleased to see Kowal tackle the topic of slavery, given the fact that Regency romances tend to ignore the fact that many of the wealthy people in England made their money from the sugar plantations in the West Indies. I dislike the convention of having stories of people of color told from the points of view of well-meaning white people, but for Kowal to discuss slavery as part of the Glamourist History series, she had to make Jane our point of view character, as Jane has been the point-of-view character in all of the other books. In the future, I would love to see Kowal write a future story from the point of view of a character of color – several in this novel leap to mind as possibilities.

The book is beautifully written, the relationship between Jane and Vincent finely drawn, and the stakes high. The one criticism I have of the book is that it’s very careful not to offend, and in the process the characters become one-dimensional. The bad guys are easily identifiable and completely irredeemable. The slaves and free people of color are all intelligent, kind, and full of common sense. Vincent and Jane, who in the past have had plenty of foibles, are unrelentingly noble, supporting each other through thick and thin with nary a cross word. They have no prejudices against the slaves, not even prejudices of class. Any false assumptions they have are quickly corrected. It’s nice to see people behave decently for a change, but it felt like a bit of a cheat. This is a feel-good story in which everyone good is all-good and everyone bad is punished, and everything ends perfectly, whereas reality was and is much more complicated in so many ways. It felt nice, but not honest.

I met Kowal at the Nebula Awards in 2013 and she was incredibly gracious and gave me a great interview, which you can read here. So I’m inclined warmly towards her books. That being said, I really think that her books succeed with me not because of bias but because of writing quality and catnip. I love Regency action. I admire Kowal’s commitment to including characters of color in her books in historically plausible ways. I adore the portrait of a happy, evolving marriage. While this book was the most exciting one in the series, it was maybe a bit over-ambitious, so ultimately, the bad characters were too bad and the good characters were too uniformly nice. Other than that, the book was exciting, emotionally powerful, gave a good conclusion to the series, and shone a light on an aspect of the Regency period that is too often ignored.

You could dive right in to this book without reading the others and catch on just fine, but I encourage readers to start at the beginning so they can see the characters evolve. Am so sad the series is over but glad Jane and Vincent are finally getting some peace and quiet!