This is the final book in the Sins of the Cities trilogy, following An Unseen Attraction and An Unnatural Vice. The first book in the series didn't work for me at all, but I enjoyed the second book a a lot. The third book split the difference of the two. Spoilers for the first two books ahead.
In An Unsuitable Heir, we finally meet the titular character, Pen Starling. He and his twin sister Greta are a pair of trapeze artists in a theatre troop, and as far as they know their mother was unmarried when they were born and the three of them were trapped in a terrible religious cult, essentially, until the twins escaped at age 14. They changed their last names and worked together to have a career flying and in general live the sort of bohemian artist life that looks very sexy from the outside but is actually quite fraught and unstable on the inside. The arc of the trilogy starts for them when Mark Braglewicz, a private inquiry agent, finds them because it turns out they're actually the oldest children of a dead earl, which means Pen stands to inherit a title and a whole bunch of money and property. And of course, they don't want it, both because they're trapeze artists and also because Pen is whatever the equivalent of genderqueer would be in that time period, and a future in which he would need to present as male publicly all the time feels unbearable to him.
Meanwhile, Mark is in a difficult spot, because he falls for Pen on first meeting and believes Pen when he tells Mark that he would never want inherit, but a. whether Pen wants it or not, he is legally a Lord, and b. there's a murderer out there determined to not let Pen and Greta inherit, which makes hiding away a bit complicated also. So he's trying to do the right thing, and also kind of making a mess of it, but eventually he and Pen fall in love and there manage to be enough twists and turns to both secure all of their futures while also allowing Pen to continue in his life.
I'm trying to figure out why the novel didn't end up feeling that satisfying to me. Part of it is that even though Pen is one of the central characters in the story, because his main motivation is to somehow avoid having something be true rather than taking action to do something, he ends up feeling oddly passive to me. Plus the story all comes together, but it's a mystery where the reader has been left so far in the dark that there's no way to anticipate any of the big surprises, but the smaller ones feel obvious. And there are a bunch of people from all three books of the trilogy involved, but they still feel quite disconnected from each other, and there are a few too many scenes of people explaining things rather than scenes showing us what happens. The POV doesn't always feel right.
I think this trilogy also suffers quite a bit in comparison with the author's Society of Gentlemen series, which has a similar sort of situation where all of our favorite characters are suddenly in a bind and the reader has no idea how they'll manage to escape but somehow they do and it's a DELIGHT. In that series the great escape is orchestrated and pulled off by the characters themselves. In this trilogy, a situation presents itself and Pen manages to take advantage of it at the last second, but it feels more like the writer figuring out a way to get themselves out of a corner than it does like something that would actually happen.
All of this also connects to one of my other issues with the book, which is that there are times when Pen's gender identity feels, to me, like it exists to provide the character with a Good Reason for why he's so opposed to being an Earl. I understand and believe that society wouldn't look kindly on these two trapeze artists who are suddenly elevated because it turns out their father was a bigamist and all that. But there's a very modern viewpoint from both Pen and Mark when they assert, with fairly limited effort, that of course it would be too much to expect Pen to live publicly as a man all the time. It ends up feeling both anachronistic and very unreasonable of the characters, which is a shitty way to feel about a character's (or person's) gender identity, but I kept thinking that the only reason there is to feel like Pen's refusal to be the Earl is at all understandable is because of his gender identity, which makes it feel like a plot point rather than who he is as a character.
It wasn't a bad book, and I definitely kept reading it because I wanted to know how it would all end up working out, but it didn't quite come together the way I was hoping it would.
Grade: B
In An Unsuitable Heir, we finally meet the titular character, Pen Starling. He and his twin sister Greta are a pair of trapeze artists in a theatre troop, and as far as they know their mother was unmarried when they were born and the three of them were trapped in a terrible religious cult, essentially, until the twins escaped at age 14. They changed their last names and worked together to have a career flying and in general live the sort of bohemian artist life that looks very sexy from the outside but is actually quite fraught and unstable on the inside. The arc of the trilogy starts for them when Mark Braglewicz, a private inquiry agent, finds them because it turns out they're actually the oldest children of a dead earl, which means Pen stands to inherit a title and a whole bunch of money and property. And of course, they don't want it, both because they're trapeze artists and also because Pen is whatever the equivalent of genderqueer would be in that time period, and a future in which he would need to present as male publicly all the time feels unbearable to him.
Meanwhile, Mark is in a difficult spot, because he falls for Pen on first meeting and believes Pen when he tells Mark that he would never want inherit, but a. whether Pen wants it or not, he is legally a Lord, and b. there's a murderer out there determined to not let Pen and Greta inherit, which makes hiding away a bit complicated also. So he's trying to do the right thing, and also kind of making a mess of it, but eventually he and Pen fall in love and there manage to be enough twists and turns to both secure all of their futures while also allowing Pen to continue in his life.
I'm trying to figure out why the novel didn't end up feeling that satisfying to me. Part of it is that even though Pen is one of the central characters in the story, because his main motivation is to somehow avoid having something be true rather than taking action to do something, he ends up feeling oddly passive to me. Plus the story all comes together, but it's a mystery where the reader has been left so far in the dark that there's no way to anticipate any of the big surprises, but the smaller ones feel obvious. And there are a bunch of people from all three books of the trilogy involved, but they still feel quite disconnected from each other, and there are a few too many scenes of people explaining things rather than scenes showing us what happens. The POV doesn't always feel right.
I think this trilogy also suffers quite a bit in comparison with the author's Society of Gentlemen series, which has a similar sort of situation where all of our favorite characters are suddenly in a bind and the reader has no idea how they'll manage to escape but somehow they do and it's a DELIGHT. In that series the great escape is orchestrated and pulled off by the characters themselves. In this trilogy, a situation presents itself and Pen manages to take advantage of it at the last second, but it feels more like the writer figuring out a way to get themselves out of a corner than it does like something that would actually happen.
All of this also connects to one of my other issues with the book, which is that there are times when Pen's gender identity feels, to me, like it exists to provide the character with a Good Reason for why he's so opposed to being an Earl. I understand and believe that society wouldn't look kindly on these two trapeze artists who are suddenly elevated because it turns out their father was a bigamist and all that. But there's a very modern viewpoint from both Pen and Mark when they assert, with fairly limited effort, that of course it would be too much to expect Pen to live publicly as a man all the time. It ends up feeling both anachronistic and very unreasonable of the characters, which is a shitty way to feel about a character's (or person's) gender identity, but I kept thinking that the only reason there is to feel like Pen's refusal to be the Earl is at all understandable is because of his gender identity, which makes it feel like a plot point rather than who he is as a character.
It wasn't a bad book, and I definitely kept reading it because I wanted to know how it would all end up working out, but it didn't quite come together the way I was hoping it would.
Grade: B
