Book Review 2023 #4 - C.C. Aune's The Ill-Kept Oath
Published by: Wise Ink Creative Publishing
Publication Date: September 27th, 2016
Format: Paperback, 416 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
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Prudence and Josephine are the very best of friends as well as family. Therefore when Prudence heads off to London with their maiden aunt Amelia for her debut season it's no surprise that the letters fly back and forth between the cousins from the metropolis to Wiltshire. Josephine feels left behind and Prudence just wishes she were home. But Prudence knows the realities, unlike her cousin, she is penniless and therefore must make a great match. Which is complicated by what she and Josephine are about to uncover. The start of the season also coincides with Prudence's eighteenth birthday. Eighteen is a milestone birthday and she is surprised by her aunt with a box. Aunt Amelia claims it's full off nothing but rubbish but has been keeping it for Prudence as a bequest from her parents. Prudence knows next to nothing about her parents, she and her brother were orphaned at a young age, and to get a mysterious box and to be told they had a rare set of talents called the Inheritance, well, it makes her question everything she's ever known. But the box appears to be rubbish indeed, relics that are better off in the trash; an Elizabethan velvet overgown, a pair of elbow-length gauntlets missing a couple of digets, a stained wool cloak, a sword with a broken blade and a dented cross-guard, and a shining gold ring which needs repair. Despite their decrepitude Prudence keeps being drawn to them and even gets the ring repaired and takes to wearing it. She's wearing the ring in fact when her aunt agrees to accept an invitation from a Baroness Revelle. It turns out that Aunt Amelia and Lady Revelle have a history, as did Lady Revelle and Prudence's mother. Which might explain why Aunt Amelia wants to keep them apart. Lady Revelle claims to know about the ring Prudence wears as well as other things. Could Lady Revelle be the answer to the cousins' questions? Because Josephine has been dealing with magical artifacts of her own discovered in the attics of Greenbank Manor; a man's costume cut for a woman that must have belonged to her own mother as well as a pair of pistols. She's woken up more than once sporting the clothes and welding the weapons somewhere on the grounds of Greenbank. Plus, not that she likes to eavesdrop, but there's an encampment of troops in Wiltshire and she could have sworn that she heard Lieutenant Quimby talking about trolls to her father. Could all of this be related? Could magic really exist? And if so, Prudence and Josephine have been lied to by those whom they love the most and they need to know why.
Many lovers of Regency Magic were first introduced to this historical fantasy subgenre through Caroline Stevermer and Patricia C. Wrede's Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot. Released in the late eighties this epistolary novel is really the go-to recommendation for this subgenre. I see why historically, but there are so many better books out there that whenever I see the recommendation to read it I instantly want to horn in on the conversation and be like, "but have you read..." and start just listing books. I can actually do it for quite awhile. But now I specifically want to say "but have you read The Ill-Kept Oath?" And then avoid shouting in someone's face that it's Jane Austen but with trolls! The non-troll reason being is that The Ill-Kept Oath has the same basic framework, two cousins who are best friends separated because one of them is having her first season and magical things start to happen which they write to each other about. I mean obviously the Regency and epistolary novels go hand in hand because of how Jane Austen herself originally wrote Sense and Sensibility, but the epistolary format has limitations. You only get access to what the characters are willing to tell their correspondent, not what else is happening in their life or what they are excluding. The Ill-Kept Oath uses an expanded epistolary form, we get letters, but we get so much more. So while this is very Sorcery and Cecelia meets Les Liaisons Dangereuses with a heavy helping of Sense and Sensibility it is so wonderfully it's own unique voice that I fell in love with it almost instantly. What's more it gave me hope in books again. A renewed love of reading. My mood is effected by what I read and for the week it took me to devour The Ill-Kept Oath I was walking on air. I had so much work to do and when I head to bed if I'm tired I will forgo reading. But it didn't matter how tired I was, I had to keep reading. I had to know more. I had to know what Lady Revelle was up to, The Ill-Kept Oath's own Marquise de Merteuil. I had to know all about what Prudence and Josephine's parents kept from them. And right there I have to call out the brilliance of this book. Often when adults keep secrets from their children in books the reasons are often lame. I mean, if it was my kid I'd totally tell them. Here it actually made sense for Amelia and Lord Middlemere to keep quiet. Of course now I can't wait to read about the fallout of that decision... Oh how I long for the sequel.
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