WASP: Or, a Very Sweet Power
When disgraced governess Bethany Harris is removed from the madhouse in which she has been incarcerated, by a mysterious black man known only as Kingfisher, she expects the worst. Instead, she finds herself being fed, clothed and cared for in the House of Masques – an establishment that rescues abused girls and transforms them into high-class, no-touch escorts, each known by a nickname whose emblem is tattooed on her cheek. But the longer Bethany stays in the House, the more she realises that there are dark and dangerous undercurrents beneath its glittering surface, and nobody is quite what they seem.
Wasp is a Gothic tale set in the late 18th century (judging by the fashions and references to the recent American War). All the characters are complex and damaged in some way by their past, from the Abbess who rules the House, to the lowly “Kittens” (or probationers) Bethany and Moth. Their stories, along with those of the Fixer, Kingfisher, Nightingale and Hummingbird, interweave, adding layer upon layer of complexity without growing confusing.
Even a smattering of minor historical errors couldn’t spoil my enjoyment of this book. (Among other things, the treadmill is a Victorian invention; “dandy” is a 19th-century word; well-educated girls were more likely to learn French and possibly Italian than Latin and Greek; Hazard is a dice game, not a card game; a couplet is a poetic form, not a dance; and gavottes had long gone out of fashion by the 1780s. In any case, all 18th-century dances, apart from the Allemande, are danced at arm’s length, so there is no danger of accidental body contact or trodden toes.)
I look forward to reading more of this author’s books. Might a reissue of his first two novels (published under the pseudonym Melanie Gifford) be in order?
