In 1794 London, four merchant class fathers who have made their way and their fortune find themselves faced with the problem of marrying off their coming of age daughters. They of course want their daughters to marry up, so they devise a plan. Their daughters will learn to play the newly invented pianoforte and then give a concert, invitation only, to the single heirs who hold high English titles but lack the fortunes to go with them. Their brilliant plan is quickly compromised however when the piano maker is forced to part with his best instrument and vows revenge. He quickly devises a plan of his own to ruin the concert and the girls' marriage prospects by providing a French piano teacher that will seduce the girls and ruin their futures. The piano maker nevertheless underestimates the abilities and jealousies of his daughter who seeks a revenge of her own. The plot thickens and twists as we are pulled into the darker secrets of these well-to-do families and discover the full extent of their ambitions. Whose plan will succeed?

Bettina P. / Marathon County Public Library
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This novel reminded me of The Crimson Petal and the White with a touch of Michelle Lovric perhaps. The story moved rather swiftly and the characters were brilliantly drawn- from the crazed pianoforte maker, to the lusty music tutor, to the silly girls taking the lessons. A somehow light hearted read, despite dealing with some hard circumstances that the characters need to deal with.
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My main reservation about a lot of historical novels is that the writers have often done so much research that the novel becomes so stuffed with period detail that the story gets swamped and I feel I'd be better off reading a non-fiction account. That's not the case with this novel. There's just enough background to give you a sense of London in 1794 -and, in particular, the effects of French Revolution hovering over everything. The beginnings of the industrial revolution and the shift of power from the old aristocratic class to the new money of the middle classes is also ever present without being hammered home in a novel which is about the newly wealthy middle class families trying to marry their daughters into the aristocracy.
However, the story is only loosely connected to a naturalistic picture of the period. By the end, it has become increasingly operatic and over-the-top sensational. If it was a film, it would have been directed by Ken Russell (it reminded me most of his 1970s movie The Devils in its build up of sexual frenzy). I found it very readable but I had to make a lot of effort at times to suspend disbelief and go with the excessive flow. As a very non-musical person, I also found the detailed descriptions of the musical practice and preparations tedious. ( )

Well, this is a ... weird... book.
I can't really think of anything else I've read that I would compare it to. It's internally consistent, but the tone is a strange mix of humor, tragedy, and prurience.

Five young women - all the daughters of social climbers. Their parents concoct a scheme to have the girls present a musical concert, playing the newfangled pianoforte, in order to lure titled husbands.

To this end, a piano is acquired and a music master hired. However, due to the piano-seller's offense at how the sale went down, he concocts a scheme to have the piano teacher seduce and deflower all five girls, and thus ruin the families' grand plans.

As it turns out, however, not all five of the girls actually need deflowering, and this scheme is not the only one that comes into play - the tables may be turned. And they may turn at unexpected angles.

This summary makes the story sound more lighthearted than it is, however. There's a lot of darkness here: rape, incest, abuse, violence, mutilation and more. Some of it is presented quite disturbingly. But then there's still that weird humor to it. And it's not quite pornographic - there's also an odd restraint to the book.

However, it is undeniably quite perverse...


Copy won through the Goodreads First Reads giveaway. Thanks to Goodreads!
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I was so excited to get this book from the Early Reviewer program, and then it took me this long to read it (whoops), so I can hardly call this review Early any more, but let me tell you why:

I just. Didn't. Like it.

I can't tell if it's that there's far too much going on in the story (which there was) or if it was just a lack of a cohesive idea underpinning it all but it was tiresome to get through. It's taken me since April to get through the book because I kept picking it up and putting it down again for something different.

I won't rehash the plot (or rather, what's the plot claims to be), because that can read any number of other places. The basic conceit is hardly new: five nouveau riche girls are in need of husbands, with titles if possible. I suppose this is where one set of reviewers drew the Jane Austen parallel. The approach was what was supposed to set this novel apart: a "wicked...romp", a "fun, lascivious gambol", "rowdy, elegant and kick-ass".

I want to find every one of these reviewers and find out how dull their lives are that these were the words they chose. That, and to present them with both dictionary and thesaurus so that they might find better, more accurate descriptors. Of all the ones claiming it was witty, I can agree that were moments, single passages that caught my attention. Here and there in this 306-page novel, there were half a dozen pairs of sentences that caught me for a moment with the beauty of the writing.

The rest of it was simultaneously dull and jarring. Too much time was spent on minutiae and major plot points were rushed through. None of the characters were fully developed and most of all, I care not a bit about any of them. Nor did the author ever, EVER give me reason to. A physical deformity is not going to make me care, one way or the other. I don't give a damn who someone sleeps with so you're going to have to try harder than that, too.

This was an interesting idea poorly executed. With another round of hard edits, the deletion of secondary plotlines and a general splash of caffeine to the language, characters and story as a whole, it might be worth recommending. At least they could do enough to punch of the story to make it worth such an evocative title. ( )