Book one-hundred-and-thirty-five: Privilege of the Sword

Privilege of the Sword (2007)
Ellen Kushner

Rating: 4/5
[The 115: 17/115]

I really liked this… but for the first 150 pages, I was just thinking (on constant loop) “where’s Richard? What the hell is Alec doing? Come on, where the hell is Richard???” Seriously, I was so on edge that I stayed up til 4 am just to find out where the hell he was. (Hmm, I probably should have just went to sleep in the first place, instead of starting to read this in the early hours of Sunday morning).

Anyway, its really good, and I loved the parallels between the stories of the two girls and I actually liked Alec by the end of it. I don’t even want to slap him anymore.

Alec, Duke Tremontaine, aka the Mad Duke of Riverside, has sent for his impoverished young niece, Katherine. She and her family hope he'll make a good marriage for her, but the Mad Duke has decided to train her as a sword fighter. She is furious, and besides a swordmaster to train her, her uncle also springs what becomes her fall into society, without warning or training, on her.

She learns the sword perforce out of self-defense and also, bit by bit, the city, the nobility, politics, and her uncle. When Katherine is trained and entered into society with her weapon, she wades hip-deep into plots against her uncle and becomes the champion of a lady in distress, too.

Plot and style hereare in the swashbuckling tradition of Dumas, but the characters are very real beneath their facades, people who bleed when they are cut, even when manners require that they make nothing of it.

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Finished: Sunday 12/8