Dry Ice Factory

I didn't like this one quite as much as Friday's Child, largely because there's what I can only describe as a lazy thread of anti-Spanish racims/exoticism that runs through it and also a much, much nastier outcropping of anti-Semitism, involving a money lender afflicting one of the members of the aristocratic family that Sophy comes to stay with and transform in the course of the story. It's still an enormously entertaining book, but the racism left a bad taste in my mouth. If I run into much more of it in Heyer (I didn't notice any in Friday's Child) I'm going to lose enthusiasm for her work real quickly.

The Grand Sophy is about Sophy, whose ambassador father leaves her with his sister's family in England while he goes off to an assignment in Brazil. His sister's husband has been financially disgraced, forcing the eldest son, Charles, to take over the family finances enabled by a surprise inheritance from an uncle (father's brother, in fact). Charles is engaged to the snobbish, disdainful Miss Wraxton, and he's a bit of a control freak with an anger problem. His oldest sister, Cecelia, is engaged to a wealthy and worthy gent somewhat her elder, but her heart belongs to the dippy, romantic, poorly (or really un)-employed poet, Augustus Fawnshope (love Heyer's names!) Sophy's father tasks his sister with finding Sophy a suitable husband, since she's now of the age, but of course Sophy has ideas of her own about whom she and her cousins should marry.

Sophy, like Hero in Friday's Child, is a winning character, but she's rather more pugnacious than the selfless Hero. Sophy is worldly, competent, knowledgeable, manipulative, and intentionally disruptive. She abhors snobs such as Miss Wraxton, but while she sympathizes with Cecelia's romanticism, Sophy is entirely practical when it comes to the subject of marriage. However, it's not totally about marrying a man of means; the man must be emotionally mature and honest and worthy of your alliance with him. One of the things that The Grand Sophy pulls off very successfully is eventually pairing Sophy with somebody who completely surprised me. I can imagine that I could have seen it coming if I were more familiar with the conventions of these kinds of romances and if I had simply done the character math better, but I didn't at all expect the actual resolution, which was delightful. I felt Heyer had done a little judo on me, by allowing me to see some developments coming ahead of time and then effectively disguising this one. Once again Heyer is particular strong at characterization, and everybody comes across as a distinct personality, for better and worse. I still love the assurance of her prose, but some of the more exotic slang and terminology of the early nineteenth century seemed too similar to that in Friday's Child. I still really enjoyed this novel, however, and I'll read more Heyer, probably Cotillion next.