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The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting (Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune 1)
By KJ Charles
Published in 2021, new edition by Orion Publishing, 2024
310 pages
Five stars

Brilliant. With over 1700 rating on Goodreads, KJ Charles hardly needs another review. But, given some of the moronic reviews I read of this book, I figured another smart one would be apt.

The thing about period romances is that it is a lot harder to write a historical novel than a romance. As Bridgerton on television has gloriously shown us, “period” is a loosely-followed notion in fiction, whether it be literary or cinematic.

KJ Charles’s agenda is to carefully create a vivid period setting for her stories, using the same kind of literary and character-building devices used by authors like Jane Austen, and later William Thackeray (Vanity Fair, 1848). She tries very hard, and mostly succeeds, at imbuing her story with authentic emotional and cultural details (language, manners) that make sense for the period. To do that and also satisfy a modern reader, who has both expectations and ignorance on their side, is a great thing.

Charles doesn’t overdo the period details in the physical setting—because authors don’t do that in the period, either. They expect you to be familiar with things. The same goes for costume and manners—the reader is expected to know this stuff, so getting too detailed feels false.

Trickier are the manners and words. There are plenty of moments when the language used by characters (especially Robin and Marianne) would never have appeared in a period novel—and yet, I could absolutely believe that such words were spoken in Regency England, if never committed to a page. Even with this, such language is used carefully and in a way that intensifies the story or the characters.

Finally, Charles’s characters—Sir John Hartlebury, the Loxleighs, Giles Vernay, Mrs. Blaine, Miss Fenwick, Lady Wintour—are all beautifully sketched in differing degrees of detail appropriate to their place in the story. These do not read as modern people dressed up; they feel right, they express themselves the way characters in period novels did.

Additionally, Robin, Hart, Marianne, are all really complicated people. Complication is what drives the plot and the emotional temperature of the book, and KJ Charles does a brilliant job at tying everything up in appropriate period knots to the point where I couldn’t imagine how it was all going to come out in the end. And yet, it all did.

Various seemingly outlandish notions—a young woman yearning to study mathematics, a former American slave running a successful brewery, a marginal aristocrat operating a successful gambling house—add to the spice and texture of the story, without adding a single false note. Charles keeps it all plausible. People in this book make choices that please modern readers without ever betraying their own time and place.

Even the sex scenes are fully engaged in building the emotional power of the narrative and never gratuitous (or simply to please the audience). Hart and Robin’s central pairing is simultaneously impossible and entirely plausible. Logically, we know such things must have existed, and people must have found happiness in same-sex relationships against all odds. KJ Charles makes it feel real.

I can’t wait to read the second book in the series, The Duke at Hazard.