My Lady's Choosing

I have to admit, I was never really a fan of the choose your own adventure books that everyone seemed to love when we were kids. I was to cautious to properly appreciate them. So many of the branches led to horrific deaths, and I didn't like those endings. I'd quickly find the single happy (safe, boring) ending and then sit there smugly while my friends recounted the various horribly consequences of their choices. I completely missed the point. Or maybe those books just weren't for me.

But a chose-your-own romance? Where every ending is a guaranteed happily ever after? That's something I can get behind.

My Lady's Choosing is a loving parody or romance novels and the women who read them. Everything is heightened. The protagonist/reader falls in love at the drop of a hat and switches her affections to the next potential love interest just as easily. It was a lot of fun to read, and to zoom through all the different romance tropes and backtracking from each new happy ending to find the next one.

There are four main branches of the story, with four main love interests. First is Mac, a Scot with a mysterious past and a heart of gold. You can help him set up an orphanage, or abandon him when you run across your first love, who faked his own death ears ago. The second branch follows Benedict, a Mr. Darcy clone with a family full of intrigue. You can help him save his fortune from his vengeful half brother or team up with said half brother and travel the world as a con artist.

Then there's Lord Craven, who hires you to be a governess and thrusts you into the world of gothic romances. There's an evil first wife, a precocious kid, and the chance to get turned into a vampire. Or you can accept Lady Evangeline's offer to travel to Egypt with her, where you'll encounter thieves, pirates, and lesbians. In addition to these, there are a bunch of places to branch off and find different happy endings with any number of characters. Pretty much every character in the book is a potential love interest, and half the fun is tracking them all down.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shadows of Self

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'...
Read more

Specials

I have to admit that the conclusion to this trilogy felt a little flat to me. There were definitely some good things, and I still think the series as a whole is good and tackles interesting questions with some good nuance. I even liked the actual ending of the story. But so much of this book felt like a rehash of the second one that I felt a little bored by the end of it. Once again, Tally has had her brain rewired, and once again she sets out into the wilderness where he solitude helps her figure out what she actually wants. The love triangle sort of fizzles out and the stakes are revealed to be not nearly as high as it seemed. What felt like a worldwide conspiracy is mostly confined to one city, and Tally's role shifts. She does help save the world, but it's more about preventing a war than ushering a grand revolution. Which isn't to say that the revolution doesn't happen. But it's not the complete overthrow of society that the rebels wanted. And that's pr...
Read more

Parable of the Sower: The Graphic Novel

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.
Read more