Look, it’s hard to find het books wherein the female lead is in charge, or at the very least an equal participant in the romantic endeavors that follow. And the latter is also sort of unsatisfying when you’ve read an entire lifetime’s worth of books which parrot the whole “AND THEN HE RAVISHED HER, THAT RAVISHER” line. Peckham writes in a pretty decently long foreword about her experience with the whole rake/virginal woman who changes him and how she wanted to turn it on its head, in a semi-non-anachronistic way.
She also includes a hilarious observation that rakes are forever either whoring or playing cards with other rakes whilst talking about whoring, except when the rake in question is the last in a series to have a book in which case he is talking about whoring while his friends the reformed rakes are dreamily talking about their 100% pregnant wives.
So, the Society of Sirens, who are sort of like sexier/less socially constricted versions of our A League of Extraordinary Women? Instead of merely writing a blueblood mud slinging pamphlet on the evils of marriage, Seraphina (what a name) is a full fledged memoir-writer who openly talks about her ‘fall from grace’ and avoids all consequence on account of her being the only progeny of her father. Instead of being a photographer, another Siren is a painter of straight up erotica, but in oil so it’s ~art. And all of them, in total, are agitating for women’s rights namely in the field of education and trade.
This sounds like I wasn’t a fan, but that couldn’t be further from the truth! I enjoyed the set up, if it lacked a bit of…verisimilitude…? But also that’s not entirely what I’m looking for. The things that did irk me were the amplitude of the back and forths (each hurdle in the way of our main couple seems to swing even more wildly than the next, making it sort of hard to see how they’ll get out of it and exhausting to boot) and some of the more modern language creeping in (lots of random “f**ks!” thrown around which are a bit jarring). There are two ragmuffins to contend with in this novel, but both are lovely and not overbearing (they do disappear with some convenience when needed, and also appear as plot devices much the same).