The Magicians and Mrs. Quent, by Galen Beckett
I suspect that Galen Beckett is a giant literature geek.
I suspect this because of the structure of this book. It bears a close resemblance overall to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but the first third is really Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell meets Pride and Prejudice. There are three Lockwell sisters instead of five, and the entailment of their estate operates in a slightly different fashion, and their father is unfortunately a madman, but you can spot Mr. Collins' counterpart a mile off, and there's even kind of a Mr. Darcy-and-Mr. Bingley thing going on, though the Darcy analogue is an Oscar Wildean fop and the Bingley analogue is impoverished, not filthy rich. It's all very Jane Austen, and reasonably well done.
Then you move into the second third of the book, which changes gears to become Jonathan
Strange and Mr. Norrell meets Jane Eyre. Or maybe something else -- my
literature-fu is weak in this area -- but definitely something in that vein. Instead of the
three third-person points of view in the first section, now you get only one in first person,
as Ivy Lockwell writes letters she never mails to her father. The action leaves
London Invarel for a gloomy old house in the hinterlands, complete with
suspicious villagers and dark secrets, and it's all very Gothic in the old sense of the
word.
So what's the last third? Honestly, it reminded me of nothing so much as Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell meets H.P. Lovecraft. The prose is not Lovecraftian in the slightest, but there's a running theme of "things man was not meant to know," and if there's anything in Regency or Victorian literature that fits such a model, I'm not familiar with it.
I keep comparing this to Susanna Clarke, because she's the high-profile example these days of fantasy modeled on early nineteenth-century England instead of Tolkienesque epic. Unlike Clarke, though, who set her story in an alternate England, Beckett has created a secondary-world setting that just bears a strong resemblance to it. (Really strong. Like, I can point to Princess Victoria, and am waiting for her to ascend the throne at some point.) At first this irritated me a little bit -- if you're going to borrow that closely, why change the names? -- but the novel ended up more than justifying the necessity of being not-England. You see it a bit at the start, where days and nights (lumenals and umbrals) are of such variable length that the characters consult almanacs to find out what tomorrow will be like, but the setting really earns its keep later in the novel, when the history of Altania starts to play a major role. It could have been England, but it would be such a different England that Beckett made the right choice.
Only three things ended up bugging me. The first was that Mr. Rafferdy and Mr. Garritt are dumped unceremoniously out of the middle third, as Ivy goes haring off with the plot; they reappear in the last third, when the story returns to Invarel, but the pov shift felt jarring. The second is that I am unconvinced by a particular aspect of the romance, and I can't tell if that's a shortcoming on the part of the story, or evidence that the story is actually on its way somewhere else. And finally, the book does not advertise in any way that it is the first in a series, which I generally like to know before I hit the end. Fortunately, things aren't left entirely hanging; you get resolution on an important part of the plot, even if the bigger problems are still looming.
On the whole, though, I found myself zooming through the book, with those three things only minor speedbumps along the way. I have something of a love for the nineteenth century, but I prefer it with a dose of fantasy rather than straight-up realism, so this was exactly my kind of thing.