Joyce, Lydia - Voices of the Night

[oyceter]

Maggie of King Street is an thief trying to get out of the flash life, only she's unfortunately gotten the attention of gang leader Danny O'Sullivan. Meanwhile, Charles Crossham, Baron of Edgington, has just made a Pygmalion bet with his sister, and when he sees Maggie audition at an opera house, he snatches her up.

To my surprise, the book focuses much less on the transformation of Maggie and more on the threats by Danny. I particularly love Maggie; she's hard and grim and cynical, and I really loved her attitude toward sex and money. Charles is fairly boring; he's your standard privileged white male with some attendant angst, but nowhere near as interesting as Maggie.

I'm not particularly sure if this is a romance, or if it's fulfilling for romance readers. I didn't buy the romance between Maggie and Charles, and it's resolved fairly quickly. The rest of the suspense in the book comes from the actual plot, from Maggie's increasing desperation and her attempts to fight for her life. Unfortunately, the plot fails to work at the climax and quickly goes into a completely unbelievable happy ending.

And yet, I will continue reading Joyce because she seems to be writing Gothics -- I am not certain of this, as I haven't read any Gothics outside of Jane Eyre, but they seem to fit rachelmanija's cracktastic posts on Gothics. I love the atmosphere and the grit, and I especially like that Joyce doesn't gloss over the seedy underbelly of Victorian London. In fact, I am fairly sure reading Joyce is to blame for my current mainlining of Sweeney Todd (strange bedtime music, I know, and I wish I had the whole thing).

She, like Brook, seems to focus on the heroine, again something rare enough in romance that it's enough for me to keep reading. She also seems to do very good desperate, scrabbling heroines pitted against powerful heroes, which I like when the book actually acknowledges things like power differentials.

I'm not sure if people in strictly for the romance or strictly for the plot will like this, but if you feel like visiting foggy, gas-lit, crime-ridden Victorian London, this may work.

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I'm probably going to read this--geekturnedvamp gave me one of Joyce's books a while back, and while I didn't adore it, I liked enough of it to try her again.

[oyceter]

Oh cool, which one of hers did you read?

I liked this one more than the post makes it sound, as it is very flawed, but I adored the heroine, which makes up for a lot for me.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

MUSIC OF THE NIGHT. I don't remember a lot of the details.