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The Covert Captain: Or, A Marriage of Equals
Nathaniel Fleming, veteran of Waterloo, falls in love with his Major's spinster sister, Harriet. But Nathaniel is not what he seems, and before the wedding, the truth will out... Eleanor Charlotte Fleming, forgotten daughter of a minor baronet, stakes her life on a deception and makes her name—if not her fortune—on the battlefield. Her war at an end, she returns to England as Captain Nathaniel Fleming and wants nothing more than peace, quiet, and the company of horses. Instead, Captain Fleming meets Harriet. Harriet has averted the calamity of matrimony for a decade, cares little for the cut of her gowns, and is really rather clever. Falling in love is not a turn of the cards either of them expected. Harriet accepts Captain Fleming, but will she accept Eleanor? Along the way, there are ballrooms, stillrooms, mollyhouses, society intrigue, and sundering circumstance.
242 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 15, 2018
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April 14, 2018Regency f/f, indeed historical f/f at a reasonable price, is rare enough that I was super excited for this, but I can't recommend it.
In part I found the style distancing and occasionally confusing. There is little description, inner thoughts, scene setting. We jump from scene to scene, plunging into the next bit of dialogue without a lot of leisure to get under the surface or explore emotions or reactions, and this kept me at arms length from the characters. Along with the picaresque structure--characters, elements and scenes just happen with no overall plot relevance--the effect for me was of watching a sequence of snapshots, always from the outside, and often too close up to work out what was going on.
This is doubtless why the book doesn't address Nora's gender. It seems she identifies as a woman and obviously wouldn't have access to modern concepts of transness. But the reader does, and historical fiction is a product of its own era, and not to address gender identity in some way feels like trans erasure, and like we missed out on a really crucial aspect of the character.
Also, and this killed the book dead for me: Harriet is casually antisemitic. There is a scene that exists purely to establish that she sees Jews as less than herself and not meriting names. And yes many people were antisemitic then but again, historical fiction is a product of its own time, and this is an authorial choice to show the heroine's casual distaste for Jews, barely challenged by Nora. IMPORTANT EDIT: I'm told the author is Jewish, so evidently the decision to show Harriet's antisemitism was a considered and deliberate one. It remains a problematic decision for me: it's such a shocking thing to read on the part of the heroine that to have it shown unchallenged by the narrative was a huge problem for me as reader. It was evidently important to the author to show English antisemitism and I am bang alongside that, but the character doing it is the *heroine*. The basis of a romance has to be our engagement with the characters, and this scene put me right off Harriet. Does author ID make a difference, given what's on the page, and what isn't? I'm honestly not sure. I am going to think about this further.
There are good things about this--some great historical details, the beginnings of really interesting characters if we'd been allowed more access to explore them--but overall, it didn't work for me.
In part I found the style distancing and occasionally confusing. There is little description, inner thoughts, scene setting. We jump from scene to scene, plunging into the next bit of dialogue without a lot of leisure to get under the surface or explore emotions or reactions, and this kept me at arms length from the characters. Along with the picaresque structure--characters, elements and scenes just happen with no overall plot relevance--the effect for me was of watching a sequence of snapshots, always from the outside, and often too close up to work out what was going on.
This is doubtless why the book doesn't address Nora's gender. It seems she identifies as a woman and obviously wouldn't have access to modern concepts of transness. But the reader does, and historical fiction is a product of its own era, and not to address gender identity in some way feels like trans erasure, and like we missed out on a really crucial aspect of the character.
Also, and this killed the book dead for me: Harriet is casually antisemitic. There is a scene that exists purely to establish that she sees Jews as less than herself and not meriting names. And yes many people were antisemitic then but again, historical fiction is a product of its own time, and this is an authorial choice to show the heroine's casual distaste for Jews, barely challenged by Nora. IMPORTANT EDIT: I'm told the author is Jewish, so evidently the decision to show Harriet's antisemitism was a considered and deliberate one. It remains a problematic decision for me: it's such a shocking thing to read on the part of the heroine that to have it shown unchallenged by the narrative was a huge problem for me as reader. It was evidently important to the author to show English antisemitism and I am bang alongside that, but the character doing it is the *heroine*. The basis of a romance has to be our engagement with the characters, and this scene put me right off Harriet. Does author ID make a difference, given what's on the page, and what isn't? I'm honestly not sure. I am going to think about this further.
There are good things about this--some great historical details, the beginnings of really interesting characters if we'd been allowed more access to explore them--but overall, it didn't work for me.
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April 25, 2018Spoilerish riff ahead.
First off I want to talk about what I enjoyed. When this author sinks into a scene and follows its emotional arc, the writing is so vivid. The war snippets resonated with the many period memoirs and letters I’ve read, and I thought the emotional damage (PTSD) very well done.
I loved Eleanor/Nora/Captain Fleming. I loved Harriet, and the fact that she was a woman of her time, as her brother Sherry was a man of his time, as well as the other officers we met briefly. Like the surgeon. Though I know they’re popular, I fall out of stories set in the past when everyone thinks like a Millennial.
I liked how comfortable Nora was with the demimondaine world—it made sense, given her life—and I really appreciated her friendship with the Mendlessohns of Aldgate. Not every British person was an anti-semite, as for example George Eliot makes clear. (And I thought Harriet’s unexamined anti-semitism was true to the time; I appreciated her character the more that she bumped hard into her unexamined assumptions.)
The last half kept me up reading quite late after the previous night when I had about two hours of sleep, which demonstrates how engaged I was.
That said, there were some problematical bits.
From my perspective, it seemed this book was not sure if it was a romance or a historical novel. Defining each of those isn’t always going to mean the same thing to everyone—fiction is not math, with neatly defined equations that are exactly the same for everyone.
Generally, what I expect from a romance is a focus on the romantic arc, though the more worldbuilding and interesting side characters the better. So, if this were a romance, for example, I’d be fine with meeting Captain Fleming/Nora as a dashing, experienced officer, whose next big life milestone is meeting the person who will become her beloved, and the story follows their coming together.
I’d be fine with Nora looking into Harriet’s eyes and knowing “she’s one of us” and with how quickly both Harriet and Sherry overcome their cultural expectations. What we want in romance is enough conflict to make the road to true love interesting, and the flow of the story, the transitions, stitch together this emotional arc.
From a historical novel, I want those details about her army experience, and Sherry’s experience, and Harriet’s growing up in the shadow of her three sisters who all died in childbirth, and her weird relationship with her mother.
This novel seems to veer back and forth between romance and historical novel via a series of sometimes ephemerally connected vignettes, including many flashbacks that I think would have been exponentially more powerful if met in realtime, as Nora, driven to desperation, learned to be Nathaniel in the middle of the rough Spanish campaign. The lack of transitions made them seem more abrupt, as if the structure of the book were struggling against itself.
I would have loved seeing more about how Nora came to define herself. She didn’t seem to be a trans man, though we got many vignettes from both exegesis and mimesis narrative positions (i.e. inside her head, and the narrator talking about ‘him’ from outside of her awareness); it appeared that she had tightly compartmentalized her life, always knowing she was Nora, but acting the role of Nathaniel as she got closer to her commanding officer. Without that ever becoming a love match. (In fact, one of the aspects I admired most was the depiction of this friendship, which so resembled the tight bonds that I’ve read in other war memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, and letters.) The fact that it transcended gender and became a bond between two violence-damaged human beings just made it that much better.
Her gender fluidity was another aspect I liked, as it matched the (sadly) little I’ve uncovered over the years. There were in historical truth women who lived as men. Who fought in wars as men, and who got away with it until they were wounded and discovered—as happened to Nora.
Some of these were men, in every way but chromosomally, others appear to have regarded themselves as women living roles. Some married as men, some cleaved to their own sex. It takes phenomenal detective work to find them, as time, cultural expectation, laws, families who made it their business to tidy away what they considered abnormal, and finally language make it difficult to discover them. But they were there.
So here’s this wonderful story that seems to skim over the top of an even better story. As a romance it was quite satisfying, but there’s so much talent here I guess I would have loved more (and also a copyeditor better acquainted with the language of the period).
First off I want to talk about what I enjoyed. When this author sinks into a scene and follows its emotional arc, the writing is so vivid. The war snippets resonated with the many period memoirs and letters I’ve read, and I thought the emotional damage (PTSD) very well done.
I loved Eleanor/Nora/Captain Fleming. I loved Harriet, and the fact that she was a woman of her time, as her brother Sherry was a man of his time, as well as the other officers we met briefly. Like the surgeon. Though I know they’re popular, I fall out of stories set in the past when everyone thinks like a Millennial.
I liked how comfortable Nora was with the demimondaine world—it made sense, given her life—and I really appreciated her friendship with the Mendlessohns of Aldgate. Not every British person was an anti-semite, as for example George Eliot makes clear. (And I thought Harriet’s unexamined anti-semitism was true to the time; I appreciated her character the more that she bumped hard into her unexamined assumptions.)
The last half kept me up reading quite late after the previous night when I had about two hours of sleep, which demonstrates how engaged I was.
That said, there were some problematical bits.
From my perspective, it seemed this book was not sure if it was a romance or a historical novel. Defining each of those isn’t always going to mean the same thing to everyone—fiction is not math, with neatly defined equations that are exactly the same for everyone.
Generally, what I expect from a romance is a focus on the romantic arc, though the more worldbuilding and interesting side characters the better. So, if this were a romance, for example, I’d be fine with meeting Captain Fleming/Nora as a dashing, experienced officer, whose next big life milestone is meeting the person who will become her beloved, and the story follows their coming together.
I’d be fine with Nora looking into Harriet’s eyes and knowing “she’s one of us” and with how quickly both Harriet and Sherry overcome their cultural expectations. What we want in romance is enough conflict to make the road to true love interesting, and the flow of the story, the transitions, stitch together this emotional arc.
From a historical novel, I want those details about her army experience, and Sherry’s experience, and Harriet’s growing up in the shadow of her three sisters who all died in childbirth, and her weird relationship with her mother.
This novel seems to veer back and forth between romance and historical novel via a series of sometimes ephemerally connected vignettes, including many flashbacks that I think would have been exponentially more powerful if met in realtime, as Nora, driven to desperation, learned to be Nathaniel in the middle of the rough Spanish campaign. The lack of transitions made them seem more abrupt, as if the structure of the book were struggling against itself.
I would have loved seeing more about how Nora came to define herself. She didn’t seem to be a trans man, though we got many vignettes from both exegesis and mimesis narrative positions (i.e. inside her head, and the narrator talking about ‘him’ from outside of her awareness); it appeared that she had tightly compartmentalized her life, always knowing she was Nora, but acting the role of Nathaniel as she got closer to her commanding officer. Without that ever becoming a love match. (In fact, one of the aspects I admired most was the depiction of this friendship, which so resembled the tight bonds that I’ve read in other war memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, and letters.) The fact that it transcended gender and became a bond between two violence-damaged human beings just made it that much better.
Her gender fluidity was another aspect I liked, as it matched the (sadly) little I’ve uncovered over the years. There were in historical truth women who lived as men. Who fought in wars as men, and who got away with it until they were wounded and discovered—as happened to Nora.
Some of these were men, in every way but chromosomally, others appear to have regarded themselves as women living roles. Some married as men, some cleaved to their own sex. It takes phenomenal detective work to find them, as time, cultural expectation, laws, families who made it their business to tidy away what they considered abnormal, and finally language make it difficult to discover them. But they were there.
So here’s this wonderful story that seems to skim over the top of an even better story. As a romance it was quite satisfying, but there’s so much talent here I guess I would have loved more (and also a copyeditor better acquainted with the language of the period).
June 14, 2021
Over my head but got the gist...that's my main takeaway.
If you're a fan of "Pride and Prejudice" or other period romances that are written in language that's hard for the present ear to grasp, are able to infer emotions and intentions without it being explicit on the page, and also value historical voice where characters always seems at a distance to the reader than you'll probably like this.
I found the read okay. I think the author has a talent for capturing the feel of the time and it's an interesting situation to explore. I liked the relationship between Nathanial (the female captain masquerading as a man) and Sherry (the major Nathanial reports to, is her best friend, and the brother to her girlfriend, Harry or Harriet, rather)...Dang these female/male names swapping around constantly was confusing. And, I thought the subject of wartime PTSD was handled well.
Underneath the flowery language is a rather sweet love story. And, since this is a historical novel which is a dangerous minefield for women not to mention sapphic women the story does have a happy ending.
That said, I like novels that take place in the past but I definitely prefer them written in modern voice that give me deep emotional connection to the characters. I cared about these characters but I wasn't gripped by them.
There is an antisemitic sentiment expressed in this book by Harriet/Harry that was a common thought of the time. When I read it I was struck. I kind of took the following scene to be Harry's view challenged by the fact that she was in Jewish company and seeing them as people but, due to the language barrier for me, honestly, I wasn't entirely sure.
The book is an interesting peek into the past though.
If you're a fan of "Pride and Prejudice" or other period romances that are written in language that's hard for the present ear to grasp, are able to infer emotions and intentions without it being explicit on the page, and also value historical voice where characters always seems at a distance to the reader than you'll probably like this.
I found the read okay. I think the author has a talent for capturing the feel of the time and it's an interesting situation to explore. I liked the relationship between Nathanial (the female captain masquerading as a man) and Sherry (the major Nathanial reports to, is her best friend, and the brother to her girlfriend, Harry or Harriet, rather)...Dang these female/male names swapping around constantly was confusing. And, I thought the subject of wartime PTSD was handled well.
Underneath the flowery language is a rather sweet love story. And, since this is a historical novel which is a dangerous minefield for women not to mention sapphic women the story does have a happy ending.
That said, I like novels that take place in the past but I definitely prefer them written in modern voice that give me deep emotional connection to the characters. I cared about these characters but I wasn't gripped by them.
There is an antisemitic sentiment expressed in this book by Harriet/Harry that was a common thought of the time. When I read it I was struck. I kind of took the following scene to be Harry's view challenged by the fact that she was in Jewish company and seeing them as people but, due to the language barrier for me, honestly, I wasn't entirely sure.
The book is an interesting peek into the past though.
March 30, 2018
Interesting...
I love hidden gender books and I don't even mind when they are historic in nature. I came upon this one while clicking on books and looking what others have purchased along with it. I won't lie, as much as I wanted to love this book I found myself lost and half the time trying to figure out the dialogue. The other half of the time I was trying to figure out scene changes and what was going on. While I did get better at the more I read, it was very frustrating. Also, it was increasingly confusing how Nathaniel would easily become Nora...after being Nathaniel for so long and since it would be safer to stay Nathaniel, this baffled me how easily Nora's name kept being mentioned...and jumping back and forth...she he, Nathaniel Nora.
It was free on kindleUnlimited. I can't say I loved it or that I even liked it. I can say I didn't hate it, I just couldn't follow it enough to like it. 2.5*
I love hidden gender books and I don't even mind when they are historic in nature. I came upon this one while clicking on books and looking what others have purchased along with it. I won't lie, as much as I wanted to love this book I found myself lost and half the time trying to figure out the dialogue. The other half of the time I was trying to figure out scene changes and what was going on. While I did get better at the more I read, it was very frustrating. Also, it was increasingly confusing how Nathaniel would easily become Nora...after being Nathaniel for so long and since it would be safer to stay Nathaniel, this baffled me how easily Nora's name kept being mentioned...and jumping back and forth...she he, Nathaniel Nora.
It was free on kindleUnlimited. I can't say I loved it or that I even liked it. I can say I didn't hate it, I just couldn't follow it enough to like it. 2.5*
August 20, 2018
A good quality f/f regency romance is as rare as hens teeth. And when author Heather Jones (of Alpennia fame) gives a 5 star endorsement, you do not saunter but run to Amazon to get yourself a copy.
The Covert Captain: Or, A Marriage of Equals was a pure delight and as authentic in prose and sensibility as you can get. Author Jeannelle M. Ferreira flexes her academic prowess in the best way and the result is to drool over. If you love Regency, that is.
If you want to listen to Jeannelle M. Ferreira talk about the book (and more) in the Lesbian Historic Motive podcast, here’s the link:
https://alpennia.com/blog/lesbian-his...
f/f
Themes: pure Regency, if you don’t like period speech don’t read it, I absolutely loved Captain Nathaniel (Eleanor) Fleming and Lady Harriet.
5 stars
The Covert Captain: Or, A Marriage of Equals was a pure delight and as authentic in prose and sensibility as you can get. Author Jeannelle M. Ferreira flexes her academic prowess in the best way and the result is to drool over. If you love Regency, that is.
If you want to listen to Jeannelle M. Ferreira talk about the book (and more) in the Lesbian Historic Motive podcast, here’s the link:
https://alpennia.com/blog/lesbian-his...
f/f
Themes: pure Regency, if you don’t like period speech don’t read it, I absolutely loved Captain Nathaniel (Eleanor) Fleming and Lady Harriet.
5 stars
March 21, 2018
Regency F/F! The world needs more! And it should all be like this, because this book is a JOY. A few chapters in I'd already started pitching it to friends as 'Georgette Heyer by way of Robin McKinley', with the latter comparison largely due to the fact that the titular captain is a Horse Person of the highest order. Despite my own disinterest in Horse People and Horse Books, I love Captain Nathaniel (Eleanor) Fleming SO MUCH, SOOOOOO MUCH, and I love Lady Harriet, and I love their quiet and passionate feelings. Though my favourite relationship in the book is probably that between Sherbourne and Fleming. REGENCY BROS-IN-ARMS.
The dialogue in this sparkles like a cave full of diamonds and the period details are incredibly immersive. I can tell it's going to be a book I reread when I need to remind myself how voice can carry prose along at a lively pace if you don't weigh it down with trappings.
BRING ON THE SEQUEL.
The dialogue in this sparkles like a cave full of diamonds and the period details are incredibly immersive. I can tell it's going to be a book I reread when I need to remind myself how voice can carry prose along at a lively pace if you don't weigh it down with trappings.
BRING ON THE SEQUEL.
September 12, 2020
I found the flowery prose far too much for me.
The wordage used is very much that of the time it is set - but as someone that never did care for Regency speak and all those period dramas where people say a heck of a lot of uncommon words yet don't actually say (or mean) much of anything - it really frustrated me.
Perhaps I am just too dumb for it? There was also a lot of french sayings which again just went above my head.
All in all, not much of anything of substance happens in the book. It's all very droll and tedious.
How one could take such an interesting premise and reduce it to nothing more than a boring tangle of words that very much seem to smug at you from the page, I don't know - but that is my opinion. It takes itself far too seriously, and the characters (and story itself) suffer for it. Do not recommend.
The wordage used is very much that of the time it is set - but as someone that never did care for Regency speak and all those period dramas where people say a heck of a lot of uncommon words yet don't actually say (or mean) much of anything - it really frustrated me.
Perhaps I am just too dumb for it? There was also a lot of french sayings which again just went above my head.
All in all, not much of anything of substance happens in the book. It's all very droll and tedious.
How one could take such an interesting premise and reduce it to nothing more than a boring tangle of words that very much seem to smug at you from the page, I don't know - but that is my opinion. It takes itself far too seriously, and the characters (and story itself) suffer for it. Do not recommend.
June 19, 2021
3.5 ⚔️ - Gallant Capt Nathaniel Flemming, or Nora to those close enough to know her Christian name, won me over.
I agree 100% with everyone who says it takes a bit to get into this book because the language patterns and vocabulary are very much "of the time". I even contemplated just skipping it, however, it really does put you back there and once I got the hang of it I really enjoyed the book. I do love me some Pride and Prejudice, and, Gentleman Jack, is, like, my favorite TV show of all time*, so I think this book works for me on those counts as well. So if something like that sounds good to you, you should give this one a try when you are in the mood for some Sapphic regency romance.
* I have watched the complete series 3x and I NEVER REWATCH TV shows. Ever.
I agree 100% with everyone who says it takes a bit to get into this book because the language patterns and vocabulary are very much "of the time". I even contemplated just skipping it, however, it really does put you back there and once I got the hang of it I really enjoyed the book. I do love me some Pride and Prejudice, and, Gentleman Jack, is, like, my favorite TV show of all time*, so I think this book works for me on those counts as well. So if something like that sounds good to you, you should give this one a try when you are in the mood for some Sapphic regency romance.
* I have watched the complete series 3x and I NEVER REWATCH TV shows. Ever.
March 22, 2019
I love this book. Just adore it. It's one of my favourite books of all time and definitely my single favourite genre romance. The premise: Captain Nathaniel Fleming, who is courageous, diffident and restrained and has years of service in the Napoleonic Wars under commanding officer and dearest friend Sherbourne, is now demobbed. Enter Harriet, Sherbourne's sister, and the rest is inevitable.
The thing is, Captain Fleming's birth name was Eleanor, and if she's going to court Harriet, the truth of it will have to come out one way or another. (NB this is an f/f romance - Fleming is a cis woman who by pragmatics and preference lives as a man, but she isn't one.) The story unfolds very gently, against the background both of the Regency England of more traditional Regency romances - balls, manners and marriages - and the brutalities of war. Fleming and Sherbourne are both significantly traumatised by their wartime experiences; Harriet has closer-to-home past abuses to deal with. The mixture of the two makes the historical period textured and compelling in a way no other Regency romance I've read has quite achieved. And the three main characters are just, utterly lovely. Again with such texture and complete realisation.
Having said all that, I can see why others might not like this book: in some ways it doesn't hit the genre beats, and it isn't the usual three act structure (or, if it is, it's very back-loaded). As well as that, the style is extremely distinctive, sparse and understated to a fault. I can see why it would be an acquired taste, but I love it: it's subtle and complex and very funny in a very understated way. A wonderful book, and I can't wait for a sequel.
The thing is, Captain Fleming's birth name was Eleanor, and if she's going to court Harriet, the truth of it will have to come out one way or another. (NB this is an f/f romance - Fleming is a cis woman who by pragmatics and preference lives as a man, but she isn't one.) The story unfolds very gently, against the background both of the Regency England of more traditional Regency romances - balls, manners and marriages - and the brutalities of war. Fleming and Sherbourne are both significantly traumatised by their wartime experiences; Harriet has closer-to-home past abuses to deal with. The mixture of the two makes the historical period textured and compelling in a way no other Regency romance I've read has quite achieved. And the three main characters are just, utterly lovely. Again with such texture and complete realisation.
Having said all that, I can see why others might not like this book: in some ways it doesn't hit the genre beats, and it isn't the usual three act structure (or, if it is, it's very back-loaded). As well as that, the style is extremely distinctive, sparse and understated to a fault. I can see why it would be an acquired taste, but I love it: it's subtle and complex and very funny in a very understated way. A wonderful book, and I can't wait for a sequel.
April 3, 2021
I really wanted to like it, I really did. The premise was interesting and what little of the plot I actually understood wasn't half bad either. But the writing style was so confusing I had no clue what was going on most of the time, which annoyed me enough I wasn't able to continue reading and abandoned the book within the first quarter. Maybe someone else will have more luck than me
March 30, 2018
I've long had a peculiar love for Regency romances (ask me about my complete collection of Georgette Heyer). Every time I've gotten wind of a Regency featuring a romance between women, I've done my best to track it down. Some have been very enjoyable, some have been adequate, some have been disappointing. But I now have a reigning favorite in this admittedly small genre: Jeannelle M. Ferreira's The Covert Captain: Or, a Marriage of Equals. Captain Nathaniel Fleming--once Eleanor--has returned from the Napoleonic wars shaken and emotionally damaged, a state she shares with her comrade and commanding officer Major Sherbourne. What she has never shared is the secret of her true gender. Fleming has long known her attraction to women, but when the woman in question is Major Sherbourne's spinster sister, there are some hard decisions to make and even harder consequences to deal with.
The Covert Captain has a strong command of its historic era, including how the varieties of sexual orientation were understood and treated at the time. The writing is rich, immersive, and solid. But where the book truly caught my heart is in the complex layerings of the plot. This isn't a simple, straightforward girl-meets-girl-disguised-as-boy story. The experiences of Captain Flemming and Major Sherbourne during the war are detailed (through flashbacks) in a realistic and incisive way that roots the motivations and reflexes of the characters and provides one set of both obstacles and resolutions to the romance. There are multiple hazards to Captain Flemming's decision to reach for love, not simply Harriet's reaction to the somewhat belated disclosure of her secret. And Harriet has secrets of her own to unravel.
I loved how their relationship progressed from shy friendship to dawning desire to misunderstanding to commitment and beyond it to a devotion that out-lasted all barriers. There is plenty of time for the reader to believe in their attraction and to watch them struggle past all the social and economic realities of the setting. I also enjoyed how the text gave us just the lightest taste of their erotic relationship without taking detours for extended sex scenes that would have felt out of place in this genre.
I'm trying very hard here to come up with logical and dispassionate explanations for why I love this book, but when it comes down to it, I have fallen deeply, madly, passionately in love with the story in a way that I would never consider believable if that love were between two fictional characters on the page. I've grown too used to being patient either with lackluster writing, or with an absense of queer characters, or with genres I'm not really into in order to get two-out-of-three in my reading. The Covert Captain does not require me to make any compromises in my love. That's a rare thing, but I dream of it becoming ordinary.
The Covert Captain has a strong command of its historic era, including how the varieties of sexual orientation were understood and treated at the time. The writing is rich, immersive, and solid. But where the book truly caught my heart is in the complex layerings of the plot. This isn't a simple, straightforward girl-meets-girl-disguised-as-boy story. The experiences of Captain Flemming and Major Sherbourne during the war are detailed (through flashbacks) in a realistic and incisive way that roots the motivations and reflexes of the characters and provides one set of both obstacles and resolutions to the romance. There are multiple hazards to Captain Flemming's decision to reach for love, not simply Harriet's reaction to the somewhat belated disclosure of her secret. And Harriet has secrets of her own to unravel.
I loved how their relationship progressed from shy friendship to dawning desire to misunderstanding to commitment and beyond it to a devotion that out-lasted all barriers. There is plenty of time for the reader to believe in their attraction and to watch them struggle past all the social and economic realities of the setting. I also enjoyed how the text gave us just the lightest taste of their erotic relationship without taking detours for extended sex scenes that would have felt out of place in this genre.
I'm trying very hard here to come up with logical and dispassionate explanations for why I love this book, but when it comes down to it, I have fallen deeply, madly, passionately in love with the story in a way that I would never consider believable if that love were between two fictional characters on the page. I've grown too used to being patient either with lackluster writing, or with an absense of queer characters, or with genres I'm not really into in order to get two-out-of-three in my reading. The Covert Captain does not require me to make any compromises in my love. That's a rare thing, but I dream of it becoming ordinary.
April 13, 2018
I WANT TO GIVE THIS BOOK TEN STARS OUT OF FIVE. Regency f/f romance with a love story I could wrap myself up in for days. Everything about this book worked for me -- lovely writing, wonderful characters I rooted for from the first moment I met them, hurdles that felt real and were so so satisfyingly overcome, and a sense of love running through the whole thing that touched me very deeply.
There's a certain spareness to the style -- things alluded to but not explored, character notes touched on that colour the book without becoming subplots -- that really, really works for me. I love books that tell me a story much bigger than the page count by all their deliberate lacunae, and I particularly loved it here, where it was not only stylistically delightful, but also felt like ways of making more space for Regency f/f romance through the hints and ideas of what other plots might have been in this one.
LOVELY BOOK IS LOVELY, A+++ RECOMMEND.
Update (13th April 2018): I've seen some commentary going by about a scene in the book that shows one of the characters being antisemitic. The scene is one of many references to Georgette Heyer's work, and I read it as a strong and valuable rebuttal to the antisemitism in The Grand Sophy. I felt it used the same light-touch approach as the rest of the book to show us whole worlds in a few moments.
There's a certain spareness to the style -- things alluded to but not explored, character notes touched on that colour the book without becoming subplots -- that really, really works for me. I love books that tell me a story much bigger than the page count by all their deliberate lacunae, and I particularly loved it here, where it was not only stylistically delightful, but also felt like ways of making more space for Regency f/f romance through the hints and ideas of what other plots might have been in this one.
LOVELY BOOK IS LOVELY, A+++ RECOMMEND.
Update (13th April 2018): I've seen some commentary going by about a scene in the book that shows one of the characters being antisemitic. The scene is one of many references to Georgette Heyer's work, and I read it as a strong and valuable rebuttal to the antisemitism in The Grand Sophy. I felt it used the same light-touch approach as the rest of the book to show us whole worlds in a few moments.
March 24, 2018
a real delight!! warm beautiful prose and gorgeous witty banter and just a really lovely romance all round <3333
September 21, 2018
There’s promise here, but, largely, this book is a missed opportunity.
The good stuff first. This feels like a clever book. More challenging than the average romance. Ferreira certainly isn’t talking down to her readers - she’s not going to baby you through this novel - she makes you work for it (far too much, in fact, but we’ll get to that). This is, at times, a poetic book, with some beautifully constructed images and sentences.
”She loitered outside the breakfast room, not quite pacing, neither advancing; she could not yet shake herself into the part of plain Nathaniel Fleming, gentleman’s son, all out of wars to fight and peace to keep. She touched for the hilt of her sabre three times before she quite knew it was no longer there.” (loc 53)
" ‘Harry’, she got down, scarce able to credit her daring. The quill-slip did not quite fit, or else Elenor’s hand shook, and the next line jogged down the page, ‘My prospects are narrower and my graces fewer than you deserve, but I would ask leave to court you.’ " (loc 958)
There were a lot of words to look up. I thought, at this point, I had a fairly good grasp of the Regency author’s dictionary but Ferreira proved me wrong. Thank goodness for the Kindle dictionary.
So, we have a nice literary style.
But, as we all know, Romancelandia cannot live by language alone. By my count a good romance has four other fundamental elements (i) plot, (ii) setting (iii) characterization and (iv) romance and this book is a serious swing and a miss on all four of those elements.
Plot: There sort of isn’t any? What Ferreira has here is an idea - a lesbian living as a man and falling in love in that guise. This is, as it goes, a pretty good core idea for a romance because it screams conflict - the deception, the risk of discovery etc etc. Ferreira kind of tacks these elements on but they never resolve into a proper plot. Harriet on discovering Nora’s (pretty bloody humungous) deception forgives her a few percentages later. Nora is outed (as a woman dressed as a man) in a very sudden fashion and without any real explanation about why the individual concerned has just barreled into her life with a view to revealing all. Everything falls apart for about 7% and then it’s all merrily resolved using that laziest of plot devices - the near death experience. There’s a section when Nora and Harriet visit Nora’s queer friends, but it’s rushed and this community and Nora’s relationship to it goes unexplored.
Setting: I think the issue here derives from the cleverness I mentioned above. Ferreira jumps from scene to scene, and perspective to perspective and, on occasion, line to line in conversation with limited signposting or scene setting. There are moments of reading a line or a paragraph, even, towards the end of the book, whole chapters, which caused literal confusion: What? Huh? Who said that? Where are we now? Why is this happening? Who is this character? What does that mean? At first, I thought this was me being too dim to follow this book. Then I started to read back the sections I’d been confused by and tried to piece them together like a mental puzzle. Slowly, I realized: this is just bad writing. Sometimes, exposition is necessary. Readers can fill in some blanks, but they cannot paint the whole canvas.
Characterisation: There is basically zero introspection in this book. There were some flashbacks with gave some insight into Nora’s war hero past but, funnily enough, nothing discussing her decision to live as a man. It appeared to be a decision born of necessity but which she had no intention of giving up - I assumed she would consider herself male if asked but then she still uses her female name. It’s just all frustratingly unarticulated. Maybe that’s what Ferreira was going for - she simply wanted to let her queer Regency character be queer without some big song and dance about the whys and wherefores. That’s fine, but it sets the reader at a distance from the characters and that’s a problem in a romance. Harriet is even more of a blank canvass than Nora. So much is said about her (she’s intelligent, for example) but we see little of it in action. Her decision to forgive Nora’s massive lie about the fact that she is not actually a man isn’t really explored. Harriet’s in love, we are told, and that is supposed to answer the issue, but you would think there was some soul searching before deciding to launch herself into a lesbian affair and what would (presumably) be an unlawful marriage.
Romance: As you’d expect, with a lack of characterization and plot and setting, the romance just does not have a chance. Why did Nora want Harriet and why did Harriet want Nora? I couldn’t tell you and, worst of all, by the end, I didn’t really care.
I have been hard on this, I know, but that’s partially because, for all the reasons I set out at the top of this review I think Ferreira has a real shot at writing a good period romance. She needs a decent editor and good betas to push her to build on the other fundamental elements of romance. A sentence/paragraph added to this here and there and a stronger plot built around the good core idea would have transformed this book into something I could recommend. However, as it stands, this is not one I would suggest picking up.
The good stuff first. This feels like a clever book. More challenging than the average romance. Ferreira certainly isn’t talking down to her readers - she’s not going to baby you through this novel - she makes you work for it (far too much, in fact, but we’ll get to that). This is, at times, a poetic book, with some beautifully constructed images and sentences.
”She loitered outside the breakfast room, not quite pacing, neither advancing; she could not yet shake herself into the part of plain Nathaniel Fleming, gentleman’s son, all out of wars to fight and peace to keep. She touched for the hilt of her sabre three times before she quite knew it was no longer there.” (loc 53)
" ‘Harry’, she got down, scarce able to credit her daring. The quill-slip did not quite fit, or else Elenor’s hand shook, and the next line jogged down the page, ‘My prospects are narrower and my graces fewer than you deserve, but I would ask leave to court you.’ " (loc 958)
There were a lot of words to look up. I thought, at this point, I had a fairly good grasp of the Regency author’s dictionary but Ferreira proved me wrong. Thank goodness for the Kindle dictionary.
So, we have a nice literary style.
But, as we all know, Romancelandia cannot live by language alone. By my count a good romance has four other fundamental elements (i) plot, (ii) setting (iii) characterization and (iv) romance and this book is a serious swing and a miss on all four of those elements.
Plot: There sort of isn’t any? What Ferreira has here is an idea - a lesbian living as a man and falling in love in that guise. This is, as it goes, a pretty good core idea for a romance because it screams conflict - the deception, the risk of discovery etc etc. Ferreira kind of tacks these elements on but they never resolve into a proper plot. Harriet on discovering Nora’s (pretty bloody humungous) deception forgives her a few percentages later. Nora is outed (as a woman dressed as a man) in a very sudden fashion and without any real explanation about why the individual concerned has just barreled into her life with a view to revealing all. Everything falls apart for about 7% and then it’s all merrily resolved using that laziest of plot devices - the near death experience. There’s a section when Nora and Harriet visit Nora’s queer friends, but it’s rushed and this community and Nora’s relationship to it goes unexplored.
Setting: I think the issue here derives from the cleverness I mentioned above. Ferreira jumps from scene to scene, and perspective to perspective and, on occasion, line to line in conversation with limited signposting or scene setting. There are moments of reading a line or a paragraph, even, towards the end of the book, whole chapters, which caused literal confusion: What? Huh? Who said that? Where are we now? Why is this happening? Who is this character? What does that mean? At first, I thought this was me being too dim to follow this book. Then I started to read back the sections I’d been confused by and tried to piece them together like a mental puzzle. Slowly, I realized: this is just bad writing. Sometimes, exposition is necessary. Readers can fill in some blanks, but they cannot paint the whole canvas.
Characterisation: There is basically zero introspection in this book. There were some flashbacks with gave some insight into Nora’s war hero past but, funnily enough, nothing discussing her decision to live as a man. It appeared to be a decision born of necessity but which she had no intention of giving up - I assumed she would consider herself male if asked but then she still uses her female name. It’s just all frustratingly unarticulated. Maybe that’s what Ferreira was going for - she simply wanted to let her queer Regency character be queer without some big song and dance about the whys and wherefores. That’s fine, but it sets the reader at a distance from the characters and that’s a problem in a romance. Harriet is even more of a blank canvass than Nora. So much is said about her (she’s intelligent, for example) but we see little of it in action. Her decision to forgive Nora’s massive lie about the fact that she is not actually a man isn’t really explored. Harriet’s in love, we are told, and that is supposed to answer the issue, but you would think there was some soul searching before deciding to launch herself into a lesbian affair and what would (presumably) be an unlawful marriage.
Romance: As you’d expect, with a lack of characterization and plot and setting, the romance just does not have a chance. Why did Nora want Harriet and why did Harriet want Nora? I couldn’t tell you and, worst of all, by the end, I didn’t really care.
I have been hard on this, I know, but that’s partially because, for all the reasons I set out at the top of this review I think Ferreira has a real shot at writing a good period romance. She needs a decent editor and good betas to push her to build on the other fundamental elements of romance. A sentence/paragraph added to this here and there and a stronger plot built around the good core idea would have transformed this book into something I could recommend. However, as it stands, this is not one I would suggest picking up.
March 19, 2018
cw: lots of period-typical homophobia and misogyny, along with antisemitism from some characters, several non-consensual gender-reveals, past child abuse.
I mostly loved this book, but there are some definite caveats to that. It's quite pleasingly, complicatedly queer, and engages with the historical period in some great ways. The two main female characters are delightful and I loved their growing relationship. And I loved that they ultimately got their happy ending, on their own terms.
Many of the supporting characters were great, and I really liked the diversity of characters who got page-time, but the ones who showed up the most never seemed to entirely gel for me. Even Harriet's brother, who is in most of the book, never felt fully realized.
There's a lot of stuff here that's more commonly glossed over in historical romances, and not just the queerness. PTSD, addiction, disease, women dying during childbirth, anti-semitism, varying degrees of poverty, Ferreira takes on a lot of the less-sexy aspects of the period and makes them matter to the story without them making the story bleak. This is a historical romance that is clearly of the time period, but doesn't romanticize the time period, and I appreciated that.
But the best thing about this book is how what seems to be a single love story about two women gradually expands to show this whole queer world. Nora's female identity is a secret, but it's not a secret she has carried alone. She has a queer community, she's had lovers, she knows she's not alone.
That said, we meet people who know Nora's identity and are accepting of it, but every character who finds out on-page, including Harriet, reacts very, very badly. And some of them get over it and some of them don't, but I would have liked to see more variety in those initial responses, or at least fewer on-page scenes of people Nora cares about treating her appallingly.
Also, there are several places in this book where the author could have engaged with the history of trans identities and the multiplicity of reasons why an afab person might choose a male presentation and just...doesn't, and that really feels like a missed opportunity.
I mostly loved this book, but there are some definite caveats to that. It's quite pleasingly, complicatedly queer, and engages with the historical period in some great ways. The two main female characters are delightful and I loved their growing relationship. And I loved that they ultimately got their happy ending, on their own terms.
Many of the supporting characters were great, and I really liked the diversity of characters who got page-time, but the ones who showed up the most never seemed to entirely gel for me. Even Harriet's brother, who is in most of the book, never felt fully realized.
There's a lot of stuff here that's more commonly glossed over in historical romances, and not just the queerness. PTSD, addiction, disease, women dying during childbirth, anti-semitism, varying degrees of poverty, Ferreira takes on a lot of the less-sexy aspects of the period and makes them matter to the story without them making the story bleak. This is a historical romance that is clearly of the time period, but doesn't romanticize the time period, and I appreciated that.
But the best thing about this book is how what seems to be a single love story about two women gradually expands to show this whole queer world. Nora's female identity is a secret, but it's not a secret she has carried alone. She has a queer community, she's had lovers, she knows she's not alone.
That said, we meet people who know Nora's identity and are accepting of it, but every character who finds out on-page, including Harriet, reacts very, very badly. And some of them get over it and some of them don't, but I would have liked to see more variety in those initial responses, or at least fewer on-page scenes of people Nora cares about treating her appallingly.
Also, there are several places in this book where the author could have engaged with the history of trans identities and the multiplicity of reasons why an afab person might choose a male presentation and just...doesn't, and that really feels like a missed opportunity.
April 23, 2018
Another historical f/f romance that I really wanted to like but couldn't, quite. There are definitely things I did enjoy here: witty dialogue, an intriguing main character, a certain dry humour in the overall tone. However, the plot's a slapdash oddity, with scene after scene strung together without any real sense for pacing or priority, all dialogue-heavy so you're often left to puzzle out the characters' motivations on your own. Major character-defining moments (like Nora's being outed to Sherbourne) are left out altogether or glossed over, whilst we get endless superfluous detail about some boring cousin and a weird scene in a mollyhouse that is entirely unnecessary to the plot.
I did like Nora/Nathaniel, but after an entire book told mostly from her perspective, I just still have so many questions that I feel ought really have been addressed. There's zero mention of her gender identity - I get that this is set before the modern framework existed but come on, it can be done in period-appropriate ways (just look at Tipping the Velvet). The author used male pronouns for Nathaniel and female ones for Nora. We never find out how she actually identifies, and I really should have liked to, even if - especially if - the idea was that none of the labels suit. We never find out whether her cross-dressing is purely for necessity and habit (she does mention it's difficult), or whether she actually enjoys it or feels it's part of her, or whatever. We never find out when in the hell she was going to tell the woman she had proposed to as a man, and been accepted by as a man, that she was not actually a man, or not a man in the conventional sense. Harriet finds out on her own, there's a wee bit of drama and nose-punching, then Harriet decides that she loves her anyway, they have sex, all is well. THAT seemed a super-quick turnaround, but then we find out - in extremely quick passing - that Harriet actually prefers women anyway. Again, something I'd have liked to be given more attention to than the description of Harriet's outfit on a random evening (or a bizarre scene with some Jewish people in which Harriet is horribly anti-semitic - wtf was that?).
Basically, after an entire book dedicated to these two characters' romance, I did not feel like I'd got to know either of them as people, which left my interest in the outcome of said romance somewhat lukewarm.
I did like Nora/Nathaniel, but after an entire book told mostly from her perspective, I just still have so many questions that I feel ought really have been addressed. There's zero mention of her gender identity - I get that this is set before the modern framework existed but come on, it can be done in period-appropriate ways (just look at Tipping the Velvet). The author used male pronouns for Nathaniel and female ones for Nora. We never find out how she actually identifies, and I really should have liked to, even if - especially if - the idea was that none of the labels suit. We never find out whether her cross-dressing is purely for necessity and habit (she does mention it's difficult), or whether she actually enjoys it or feels it's part of her, or whatever. We never find out when in the hell she was going to tell the woman she had proposed to as a man, and been accepted by as a man, that she was not actually a man, or not a man in the conventional sense. Harriet finds out on her own, there's a wee bit of drama and nose-punching, then Harriet decides that she loves her anyway, they have sex, all is well. THAT seemed a super-quick turnaround, but then we find out - in extremely quick passing - that Harriet actually prefers women anyway. Again, something I'd have liked to be given more attention to than the description of Harriet's outfit on a random evening (or a bizarre scene with some Jewish people in which Harriet is horribly anti-semitic - wtf was that?).
Basically, after an entire book dedicated to these two characters' romance, I did not feel like I'd got to know either of them as people, which left my interest in the outcome of said romance somewhat lukewarm.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 26, 2018
Lovely Regency Romance, enjoyed reading it. Great characterisation and setting, and well-developed characters, whom I totally fell in love with. The twist at the end was great. There were some jumps in the story line which sometimes made it a little tricky to follow.
I wish I had thought to review immediately after reading the book, so I could remember more specifics. I will have to come back and expand on this review once I have a bit more time in the summer. Looking forward to reading more from this author.
I wish I had thought to review immediately after reading the book, so I could remember more specifics. I will have to come back and expand on this review once I have a bit more time in the summer. Looking forward to reading more from this author.
March 24, 2018
I tend not to read a lot of f/f fiction because I am much pickier about it than a lot of other genres -- so when I say that I really enjoyed this Regency romance, I mean that it is really, really good.
I'm always up for a good cross-dressing story, and this definitely delivers that, with a nice romance plot as well. The style is charming and very well-done -- although admittedly I don't usually read Regency novels, so I wouldn't know about any anachronisms -- and I enjoyed the effort that clearly went into showing the diversity of the setting and giving Nora and Harry a queer community. They were both very well-drawn characters, and I definitely wanted them to get together and stay happy; even the minor characters were great. Also, there were horses! Lots of horses! If you're looking for a f/f historical romance, you could do a lot worse than this. (And, let's be honest, if you are looking for f/f historical romance, you have probably done a lot worse than this. There used to not be so many good options, and I had to settle. A lot.)
I do have to concur with another reviewer that it is a little weird that no mention of trans issues ever comes up -- I mean, sure, maybe Nora is absolutely secure in her gender identity, but you'd kind of think one of the people who knew her secret might have wondered or asked her? And similarly, it is disheartening that, of the people who find out her secret, none of them take it well initially and it's all pretty... grim. They get better! It's just sad.
But on the whole, it's a fun book, and I am happy to have stumbled across it.
I'm always up for a good cross-dressing story, and this definitely delivers that, with a nice romance plot as well. The style is charming and very well-done -- although admittedly I don't usually read Regency novels, so I wouldn't know about any anachronisms -- and I enjoyed the effort that clearly went into showing the diversity of the setting and giving Nora and Harry a queer community. They were both very well-drawn characters, and I definitely wanted them to get together and stay happy; even the minor characters were great. Also, there were horses! Lots of horses! If you're looking for a f/f historical romance, you could do a lot worse than this. (And, let's be honest, if you are looking for f/f historical romance, you have probably done a lot worse than this. There used to not be so many good options, and I had to settle. A lot.)
I do have to concur with another reviewer that it is a little weird that no mention of trans issues ever comes up -- I mean, sure, maybe Nora is absolutely secure in her gender identity, but you'd kind of think one of the people who knew her secret might have wondered or asked her? And similarly, it is disheartening that, of the people who find out her secret, none of them take it well initially and it's all pretty... grim. They get better! It's just sad.
But on the whole, it's a fun book, and I am happy to have stumbled across it.
Read
June 14, 2024I'm just a girl, standing in front of authors, begging them to have more internal conflicts between their sapphic couple.
Ferreira does some good things in this book. She's clearly interested in the history of the time (after Waterloo) and grounding her characters in the overall world setting. I feel like there is a good book in here somewhere; however, this book read like a series of snapshots instead of a cohesive narrative and is massively underwritten. Often in a scene, I didn't really know where the characters were or where the characters stood in relation to each other. Ferreira assumes the readers should know things based on very little details. I think she has the correct notion where readers don't need to be told everything and should glean clues from the scene, but by god those clues are sparse.
Ferreira does some good things in this book. She's clearly interested in the history of the time (after Waterloo) and grounding her characters in the overall world setting. I feel like there is a good book in here somewhere; however, this book read like a series of snapshots instead of a cohesive narrative and is massively underwritten. Often in a scene, I didn't really know where the characters were or where the characters stood in relation to each other. Ferreira assumes the readers should know things based on very little details. I think she has the correct notion where readers don't need to be told everything and should glean clues from the scene, but by god those clues are sparse.
August 26, 2018
With The Covert Captain, Ferreira delivers an intricate, gorgeously written lesbian Regency romance. From the first page, we’re let in on Eleanor’s secret, following along as she lives her life almost 24/7 as Nathaniel. Its first scene works especially well because it immediately establishes that the people closest to her truly believe Eleanor to be Nathaniel, while it also simultaneously making it clear that she must always be on guard against someone learning her secret and taking away the life that she’s forged for herself. And Eleanor is right to be concerned: as a woman without connections to fall back on and more than a decade of experience passing as a man, she would truly lose everything. She also already has more than enough to deal with, given the daydreams and nightmares she’s grappling with—what we would likely call PTSD today.
The story shifts perspectives between Eleanor and Harriet, so that we also see the restrictions Harriet experiences as a spinster who’s much closer to thirty than she is to twenty. She’s brilliant and headstrong, and it’s no wonder that Eleanor is drawn to her energy. As a (seemingly) heterosexual couple, they must ensure that their interactions are always entirely proper. This makes for an especially interesting dynamic between them, because if Harriet had known from the get-go that Fleming is a woman, they could have spent much more time together without anyone batting an eye.
Full review: https://www.lambdaliterary.org/review...
The story shifts perspectives between Eleanor and Harriet, so that we also see the restrictions Harriet experiences as a spinster who’s much closer to thirty than she is to twenty. She’s brilliant and headstrong, and it’s no wonder that Eleanor is drawn to her energy. As a (seemingly) heterosexual couple, they must ensure that their interactions are always entirely proper. This makes for an especially interesting dynamic between them, because if Harriet had known from the get-go that Fleming is a woman, they could have spent much more time together without anyone batting an eye.
Full review: https://www.lambdaliterary.org/review...
March 23, 2018
What a delight! F/F Regency romance is exactly my thing, and this is everything I want from that. So good. I want to re-read this many times.
I especially love Eleanor, who is allowed to be stompy and human and falliable and damaged and wonderful. But Harriet is also wonderful - there's a moment of reveal for her that is so quietly perfect, I'd read the book for that alone. And TOGETHER they are just amazing.
I was warned that there is antisemitism in the story, and there is. I ended up feeling fine with it: the Jewish characters are almost exactly the opposite of the moneylender in Heyer's 'The Grand Sophy', and I really appreciated that. I love that there's a queer CULTURE in this book, and the Jewish characters are central to it.
The other thing to comment on is the style. I took a moment to get used to it; this book's scene structuring is truly sparse, like nothing else I've read. But I ended up loving it. It's super focused, it has such confidence in what matters t0 the story. And ultimately, what matters is queer ladies in love. I love that.
I especially love Eleanor, who is allowed to be stompy and human and falliable and damaged and wonderful. But Harriet is also wonderful - there's a moment of reveal for her that is so quietly perfect, I'd read the book for that alone. And TOGETHER they are just amazing.
I was warned that there is antisemitism in the story, and there is. I ended up feeling fine with it: the Jewish characters are almost exactly the opposite of the moneylender in Heyer's 'The Grand Sophy', and I really appreciated that. I love that there's a queer CULTURE in this book, and the Jewish characters are central to it.
The other thing to comment on is the style. I took a moment to get used to it; this book's scene structuring is truly sparse, like nothing else I've read. But I ended up loving it. It's super focused, it has such confidence in what matters t0 the story. And ultimately, what matters is queer ladies in love. I love that.
May 24, 2018
So this was a difficult read for me. I found the writing style to be very difficult to follow. The storyline is good and unique. The problem is you are left with a ton of whys. You get no real background info, so the MCs lack depth. There was very interesting historical detail here. It's a quick read. I read it in one sitting. So, if you enjoy gender bending historical fiction like I do-you may consider this. The fact that you can read it free if you have Kindle Unlimited makes it even more attractive.
April 7, 2018
Content Warnings: homophobia, transphobia, possible trans-erasure, references to past child sexual abuse, references to past child abuse, mild anti-Semitism, unwilling gender outing, offensive time-appropriate terms, PTSD from war, sibling death
I am not a fan of this book, but I am 100% the audience for an f/f regency. And while I enjoyed some aspects of the book, I spent much of my reading indifferent to enraged. I did generally like the characters and even the developing romance, but it never connected with me because of the writing style, the headhopping perspectives, my mild confusion, and then my anger when one word was used towards the end.
The book employs a tremendous amount of headhopping within the early scenes, so it is not exactly clear if Fleming identifies as a woman or is possibly nonbinary or genderfluid. I know it will be argued that I’m applying a modern perspective on gender and sexuality, but the book’s lack of clarity and consistency with pronoun usage and perspective speaks for itself:
“A moment’s fumbling, lips against teeth, chill noses all out of place, and Captain Fleming’s fingers went loose in her hair. Harriet slid her own hand into his queued curls, rested her cheek against his and would not let him shrug away. With the second kiss he recalled the art, how two people fit and breathed together…”
Changing between perspectives is often not signaled, making it impossible to know who we are following. Further, the book does not maintain either an omniscient point-of view or a deep third person POV that’s typical in historical romance. It flits between both, which was beyond jarring.
On the issue of gender, it should be noted that Fleming’s gender is revealed twice. Once, she is making out with Harriet, and Harriet notices the lack of a penis and freaks out. How this scene affects Fleming is never dealt with, nor is how Harriet works her way back to realizing she loves the person no matter what. And later, Fleming’s gender is revealed without her consent, which results in someone else’s freakout as well as a threat to her safety. There are hints of transphobia.
Further, I think there are trans-erasure issues too. This brings us back to the modern perspectives applied to historical narratives argument. And in 2018, authors owe the present more care than the past when it comes to marginalized identities. Does Fleming identify as a woman, a transman, nonbinary, genderfluid, genderqueer? I don’t know. What I do know is that Fleming lives as a man, dresses as a man throughout most of the book (one flashback aside), and is called Captain, Fleming, or Nathaniel by everyone but Harriet. Because the text doesn’t engage with that, I can’t ignore the possibility that there are trans-erasure issues.
Sort of a spoiler, but mainly a self care warning if you aren't prepared for a slur.
And the writing is purposely antiquated. I would even say inaccurately so, but I’m not an authority on that; however, it doesn’t mimic what I know of the speech style of 1817-1820. The style attempts for something older, which made reading difficult. The use of language is a fine line writers of historical romance walk. If it’s too modern, complaints roll in about your use of “OK;” but if it’s too of the past, I end up saying overly antiquated. I want books to be immersive experiences, but they can’t be immersive when I am looking up phrases and terms multiple times per chapter to understand what was meant. They aren’t immersive if I don’t know whose POV I have.
HOWEVER, I did like Captain Fleming and Harriet, but I’m upset that I barely knew what they were thinking and feeling. And that’s my biggest issue with the romance: we barely scraped the surface with the characters. Just as we begin to really learn about how they feel and what they want, the scenes end. The book walks right up to the line where I begin to care and then cuts to some other scene. There is no time to be engrossed with the feelings, revelations, and even the romance. The book seemingly does not engage with how these two people are figuring out who they are to each other and who they want to be.
My review at Love in Panels.
I am not a fan of this book, but I am 100% the audience for an f/f regency. And while I enjoyed some aspects of the book, I spent much of my reading indifferent to enraged. I did generally like the characters and even the developing romance, but it never connected with me because of the writing style, the headhopping perspectives, my mild confusion, and then my anger when one word was used towards the end.
The book employs a tremendous amount of headhopping within the early scenes, so it is not exactly clear if Fleming identifies as a woman or is possibly nonbinary or genderfluid. I know it will be argued that I’m applying a modern perspective on gender and sexuality, but the book’s lack of clarity and consistency with pronoun usage and perspective speaks for itself:
“A moment’s fumbling, lips against teeth, chill noses all out of place, and Captain Fleming’s fingers went loose in her hair. Harriet slid her own hand into his queued curls, rested her cheek against his and would not let him shrug away. With the second kiss he recalled the art, how two people fit and breathed together…”
Changing between perspectives is often not signaled, making it impossible to know who we are following. Further, the book does not maintain either an omniscient point-of view or a deep third person POV that’s typical in historical romance. It flits between both, which was beyond jarring.
On the issue of gender, it should be noted that Fleming’s gender is revealed twice. Once, she is making out with Harriet, and Harriet notices the lack of a penis and freaks out. How this scene affects Fleming is never dealt with, nor is how Harriet works her way back to realizing she loves the person no matter what. And later, Fleming’s gender is revealed without her consent, which results in someone else’s freakout as well as a threat to her safety. There are hints of transphobia.
Further, I think there are trans-erasure issues too. This brings us back to the modern perspectives applied to historical narratives argument. And in 2018, authors owe the present more care than the past when it comes to marginalized identities. Does Fleming identify as a woman, a transman, nonbinary, genderfluid, genderqueer? I don’t know. What I do know is that Fleming lives as a man, dresses as a man throughout most of the book (one flashback aside), and is called Captain, Fleming, or Nathaniel by everyone but Harriet. Because the text doesn’t engage with that, I can’t ignore the possibility that there are trans-erasure issues.
Sort of a spoiler, but mainly a self care warning if you aren't prepared for a slur.
And the writing is purposely antiquated. I would even say inaccurately so, but I’m not an authority on that; however, it doesn’t mimic what I know of the speech style of 1817-1820. The style attempts for something older, which made reading difficult. The use of language is a fine line writers of historical romance walk. If it’s too modern, complaints roll in about your use of “OK;” but if it’s too of the past, I end up saying overly antiquated. I want books to be immersive experiences, but they can’t be immersive when I am looking up phrases and terms multiple times per chapter to understand what was meant. They aren’t immersive if I don’t know whose POV I have.
HOWEVER, I did like Captain Fleming and Harriet, but I’m upset that I barely knew what they were thinking and feeling. And that’s my biggest issue with the romance: we barely scraped the surface with the characters. Just as we begin to really learn about how they feel and what they want, the scenes end. The book walks right up to the line where I begin to care and then cuts to some other scene. There is no time to be engrossed with the feelings, revelations, and even the romance. The book seemingly does not engage with how these two people are figuring out who they are to each other and who they want to be.
My review at Love in Panels.
August 26, 2018
Very good historical fiction novel.
Many years after taking over her deceased brothers military commission Nathaniel/Eleanor returns to England with her friend and commanding officer. Still presenting male, she falls for and proposes to said officer's sister, Harriet. But can their fledgling love and relationship survive the unraveling of Eleanor's secret?
Many years after taking over her deceased brothers military commission Nathaniel/Eleanor returns to England with her friend and commanding officer. Still presenting male, she falls for and proposes to said officer's sister, Harriet. But can their fledgling love and relationship survive the unraveling of Eleanor's secret?
March 25, 2018
So I generally avoid f/f, because I always end up hating it -- and I should've followed that here, but my wife insisted it was good.
Reader, it wasn't. :(
It lived up to the premise, I guess (woman has disguised herself to go enlist as a cavalry officer in the Napoleonic Wars, she comes home, falls in love with her superior officer's sister). And there were definitely parts that I really liked. But it was written as a never-ending-stream of vignettes, not connected narrative. I HATE that. I felt confused about what was going on in many places; their conversations and motives were incomprehensible in so many places. I have no idea why it wasn't a book about a trans man (it would've made more sense given the pronouns used in many of the scenes from the MC's POV). I hated the homophobic freak-outs by both the LI and her brother; I wasn't really expecting them, and then they were resolved much too quickly for how virulent they'd been.
If only there had been narrative instead of hop-hop-hop sketchy scenes, this might've been a good f/f historical. But alas.
Reader, it wasn't. :(
It lived up to the premise, I guess (woman has disguised herself to go enlist as a cavalry officer in the Napoleonic Wars, she comes home, falls in love with her superior officer's sister). And there were definitely parts that I really liked. But it was written as a never-ending-stream of vignettes, not connected narrative. I HATE that. I felt confused about what was going on in many places; their conversations and motives were incomprehensible in so many places. I have no idea why it wasn't a book about a trans man (it would've made more sense given the pronouns used in many of the scenes from the MC's POV). I hated the homophobic freak-outs by both the LI and her brother; I wasn't really expecting them, and then they were resolved much too quickly for how virulent they'd been.
If only there had been narrative instead of hop-hop-hop sketchy scenes, this might've been a good f/f historical. But alas.
February 11, 2019
This was a really charming concept but this was a series of vignettes rather than a book.
There was basically no connective tissue between the different scenes, with scenes happening immediately one after the other having no segue between and the passage of time and space between scenes not being well established. It felt like a series of drabbles put together in mostly chronological order and then all packaged up together and called a book rather than a novel.
The writing within each scene is pretty good and one of the more skillful evocations of the Regency turn of phrase that I have seen.
I really wanted to love this book - queer women! masquerade! sticking it to the patriarchy! - but I couldn't get over the amount of work I had to do just to figure out what was going on from scene to scene.
There was basically no connective tissue between the different scenes, with scenes happening immediately one after the other having no segue between and the passage of time and space between scenes not being well established. It felt like a series of drabbles put together in mostly chronological order and then all packaged up together and called a book rather than a novel.
The writing within each scene is pretty good and one of the more skillful evocations of the Regency turn of phrase that I have seen.
I really wanted to love this book - queer women! masquerade! sticking it to the patriarchy! - but I couldn't get over the amount of work I had to do just to figure out what was going on from scene to scene.
April 24, 2018
2.5 even.
i really wish i could've liked this, but sadly i have a big problem with this writing style which makes it quite hard to enjoy reading + i found the story badly told, with strange jumps from one scene to the next, shallow descriptions of the characters and dialogues + i couldn't connect with the characters -- which probably has to do with the writing, too. but oh well :(
kudos for the sexy scenes and the mention of crossdressing at the time, tho.
i really wish i could've liked this, but sadly i have a big problem with this writing style which makes it quite hard to enjoy reading + i found the story badly told, with strange jumps from one scene to the next, shallow descriptions of the characters and dialogues + i couldn't connect with the characters -- which probably has to do with the writing, too. but oh well :(
kudos for the sexy scenes and the mention of crossdressing at the time, tho.
January 6, 2021
I enjoyed the story of Nora and Harry. It’s a very good read and I love a good historical romance. The only thing keeping me from 5 stars was the dialog. I did have to reread a few passages to make sure I was understanding things correctly and fallowing along.
March 22, 2019
This is a lovely queer regency romance! I love the story and the characters! (...I er, may have stayed up until 1 am reading it) I hope there will be a sequel at some point!
January 7, 2020
anti-Semitic as fuck.
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