The Other Blahter

3.5 stars (very mild spoilers herein)

If I could sum this book up, it would be with the appropriately trite “interesting, but not memorable.” The Other Daughter follows Rachel Woodley, and, look, I’m just going to go with the Goodreads description on this one because it’s already pretty succinct:

“Raised in a poor yet genteel household, Rachel Woodley is working in France as a governess when she receives news that her mother has died, suddenly. Grief-stricken, she returns to the small town in England where she was raised to clear out the cottage…and finds a cutting from a London society magazine, with a photograph of her supposedly deceased father dated all of three month before. He’s an earl, respected and influential, and he is standing with another daughter-his legitimate daughter. Which makes Rachel…not legitimate. Everything she thought she knew about herself and her past-even her very name-is a lie.

Still reeling from the death of her mother, and furious at this betrayal, Rachel sets herself up in London under a new identity. There she insinuates herself into the party-going crowd of Bright Young Things, with a steely determination to unveil her father’s perfidy and bring his-and her half-sister’s-charmed world crashing down. Very soon, however, Rachel faces two unexpected snags: she finds she genuinely likes her half-sister, Olivia, whose situation isn’t as simple it appears; and she might just be falling for her sister’s fiancé…”

The biggest problem, I think, is that when it comes down to it, Rachel isn’t actually that strong of a character. From a description like the above, you’d think she was some kind of firecracker, but she’s really not. She exhibits bright moments of witty cynicism and only occasionally the kind of confident self-possession you might expect from the type of person assuming a new identity and plotting revenge, but what that whole description leaves out is that she’s being very heavily coached by a man, a gossip columnist named Simon, and what Rachel wants seems to get lost in the fray several times. The lack of clarity is such that when, at some point, Rachel goes charging in to see Simon, demanding that she “changed her mind,” she DOES want revenge, I was confused that they weren’t working up to that the whole time already.

The relationships between Rachel and everyone else who isn’t Simon are also very simple, and do little to add further dimension to anyone. Rachel befriends Cece, leader of the Bright Young Things, and Cece is drunk, frivolous, and mostly into the idea of Rachel’s friendship because Rachel claims she can read fortunes in cards and Cece thinks that is just delightful. Where the official description claims that Rachel “genuinely likes” her half-sister Olivia, in reading I found that the truest description of the feeling that Rachel musters for her is sympathy for how her mother treats her, but otherwise profound apathy. This is all fairly important, not only because relationships can help to define characters, but also because the entirely of Simon and Rachel’s plan hinges on Rachel getting in with Cece (cousin to Olivia) well enough to secure an invitation to a party at her father’s country estate. In other words, we were supposed to care about and believe in their friendship, which I never did, for a second. How this was actually meant to play out anyway became less and less clear once I read on and found that Olivia’s mother is the person who extends the invitations, and she doesn’t have much warmth in her heart for even Cece and much less so for Cece’s degenerate friends. So, Simon and Rachel just end up crashing the party anyway, which makes the whole middle section of the book fairly pointless as an exercise in executing a plan OR in developing friendships.

For all of that, the book is still fun. Rachel has a sense of humor on her, even if her still waters don’t run very deep. Her interactions with Simon are worth reading, but don’t go in expecting a full-blown romance either, because it’s not that. I mostly liked the book, actually, for the immersion into the Roaring Twenties in London, a period which I tend to neglect in my historical fiction reading. Anyone have any good recommendations for (lighter) fiction in this period?