For some reason, the title of this book put me off of it for the longest time. I'm so glad I finally got around to reading it -- excellent historical fiction, with a stubborn young woman at the heart of it. There are things I found difficult to believe, given the social setting, but I found her journey into adulthood and personal responsibility to be excellently well depicted. These characters felt very real to me -- unlike in many teen books, when the main character fails to do what they know is right and the drama just grows and grows from there, in this book failures are acknowledged and (eventually or immediately forgiven). I was completely drawn into the suffrage movement and the artistic scene, and I loved the pre-raphaelite mentions. ( )

Excellent. Made me feel like I was living in London, 1909. The suffragist history is excellent, full of details, the footnote at end sorts out which are historical and which fiction.

The main character, Vicky, has the same dilemma women face today but her choices are starker. Great historical fiction, a solid romance coupled with a sense of history.

Highly recommended. ( )

I read until page 100. That was it for me.

This book is about a girl named Victoria that gets herself into a bit of a scandal when her boarding school discovers that she has been skipping extracurricular classes to attend art classes. The scandal is intensified when it is discovered that she posed nude for a sketching class. She dreams of becoming a true artist but her family wants her to marry up and into an equally if not more wealthy family. She’s willing to marry the man her parents have set her up with because he can pay her tuition for art college until she finds a muse in a low class police constable.

This book is supposed to be about feminism and not conforming to limitations placed on women by men but I couldn’t stand Vicky. I’ll admit I was duped into thinking Edmund was a really nice guy and he was but then he took a 180 turn and at that point I would have quit the book if I didn’t realize I was almost done with it. Now I realize that finding out his fiancée has been cheating on him for months was probably what did him in. But the whole thing just got so horrible that the side characters that I liked so much became enablers for Vicky to continue her horrible behavior and excused her for what she had been doing.

I hate when love triangles start off well with both options being viable but then start leaning heavily towards one and completely destroying the other person’s characterization as if that was what’s needed to break the triangle. The more I think about this book the less I like it because Vicky is truly insufferable but I did like the background. ( )

Seventeen-year-old Victoria Darling longs to be an artist; however, when her love of art leads to expulsion from her French finishing school, her high society London parents bring her home and lay out a plan for her rehabilitation, which includes an arranged marriage to a young man from a proper family. Her alternative: to be banished to a life of near-solitude with her unmarried aunt in Norfolk who has no use for art, literature, or fun of any kind. Victoria still plans to apply to the Royal College of Art without her parents’ consent, and her pursuit of this goal causes her path to cross with suffragettes and a police constable sympathetic to their cause. The resulting interactions fuel further questioning of the demands society places on her as a young woman. This heartfelt and often humorous book, which is young adult fiction, will appeal to fans of historical fiction of all ages. Fans of Downton Abbey are likely to enjoy this book since it explores the pressures on young women of the Edwardian era and depicts “the season” as it would have been experienced by the Crawley daughters.

Rachel H. / Marathon County Public Library
Find this book in our library catalog.

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