Something Fabulous

Something Fabulous (2022) Alexis Hall (Something Fabulous)

Set in Historical England.

To be honest, I don’t think this is historical England as much as fantasy historical England. Which is fine, since as he says in the author’s note, almost everyone in the story is queer.

Valentine Layton, the Duke of Malvern is expected to marry Miss Arabella Tarleton. It’s what their fathers’ wanted and he will do his duty.

Arabella, however, has no desire to be a duty.

So she runs away. And Valentine and Arabella’s twin brother Bonny must go after her.

This is a very, very silly story.

“You see,” Tarleton pressed him, “why I’m concerned?”

“As it happens I do. I’m relieved that one of you at least is blessed with some modicum of sense.”

“I mean, she could be captured by pirates or highwaymen or . . . or vampires or anything.”

“Forgive me, I spoke prematurely.”

To be honest, I need to reread this book with the initial mindset that it is a comedic historical fantasy. I was expecting it to be one thing, and it was completely different, and I failed to wrap my head around that.

Which is why I’ve been rereading so much for the past two years.

Valentine is in the category of demi / gray ace , which is why he has such a difficult time with, well, almost everything.

“No,” said Valentine slowly, and with a vague sense of dread that perhaps he was going to be peculiar even by the standards of people who were peculiar. “I have never felt that sort of inclination towards anyone, man or woman.”

I think part of what I had a difficult time with is that I identified with Valentine on that level so much that I had a hard time sympathizing with Bonny at times, and Arabella at all.

I mean, yeah, Valentine is an arrogant and entitled ass, but he really doesn’t know any other way to be.

While Valentine had been nebulously aware he was considered handsome, he had never quite known what to do about it. Grown increasingly taunted by it across the years. What, after all, was the use of being pleasing to the eye when he had found in himself only an obscure hollowness? A well of waiting and searching and wanting but never finding in which he had drowned a little deeper with every day that passed.

The world is an incredibly strange place when you don’t understand most of what goes on around you.

Publisher: Montlake

Rating: 7/10

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