{"id":6703,"date":"2025-09-19T06:14:23","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T13:14:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=6703"},"modified":"2025-09-19T06:14:23","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T13:14:23","slug":"tasha-alexander-the-sisterhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/tasha-alexander-the-sisterhood\/","title":{"rendered":"Tasha Alexander: The Sisterhood"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lady Emily #19<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Like a great box of chocolates, all of Tasha Alexander\u2019s books are deliciously enjoyable, some more than others, but all of them pure pleasure to consume.\u00a0 The 19th novel in this series is no exception, and this installment finds Lady Emily in 1907 London, being asked (along with her dashing husband) to look into the mysterious death of the most fabulous debutante of the season, Victoria Goldsborough, who collapsed in her fianc\u00e9e\u2019s arms while waltzing.\u00a0 And that\u2019s just the prologue.<\/p>\n

Alexander always has an expertly done traditional mystery at the heart of her novels, complete with all the golden age trappings \u2013 red herrings, clever investigative set backs, surprising turns and reveals.\u00a0 It\u2019s such a knotty puzzler that it\u2019s hard going for the sleuths,\u00a0 but one of the things they manage to unearth is that Victoria was part of a secret suffragette group who were hoping to change things from the inside (to say much more would be a spoiler).<\/p>\n

Either for it or against it, the Suffragette movement is top of mind for many of the women in the book, with Emily, of course, all in favor of women\u2019s rights while her conservative mother finds the very idea a ridiculous scandal.\u00a0 With the full support of her enlightened husband and the disapproval of her butler, Emily operates in a very modern manner, drinking port with the gentlemen after dinner and even indulging in the occasional cigar.<\/p>\n

Alexander always has a dual storyline, one of them set in the past, in this case in the time of Queen Boudica, the warrior Queen who led a revolt against the Romans in AD 60. While ultimately defeated, she remains to this day a symbol of resistance against an oppressor. This thread, however, mostly follows a young woman named Vatta, who is being courted by a prominent Roman, and gains some status by befriending Boudica, but still does not feel that she fits into her tribe very well. Other than her name, I knew next to nothing about Boudica, and enjoyed learning about her and her era.\u00a0 The toggling between the two engaging storylines becomes an effective narrative device setting up nice cliff hangers at the end of each chapter.\u00a0 Sometimes I was more in suspense about one storyline or the other, but the chapters are short, and the cliffhangers are quickly resolved.<\/p>\n

The solution of the mystery in Lady Emily\u2019s storyline was both heartbreaking and surprising.\u00a0 After 19 books into this series I still didn\u2019t see the twist coming, earning a chef\u2019s kiss for this clever and endlessly inventive author.\u00a0 The resolution of the Iron Age\u00a0 storyline was heartbreaking and satisfying as well,\u00a0 delivering a much appreciated history lesson. To the last morsel at the bottom of the candy box I savored my annual reunion with Lady Emily.\u00a0\u00a0— Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lady Emily #19 Like a great box of chocolates, all of Tasha Alexander\u2019s books are deliciously enjoyable, some more than others, but all of them pure pleasure to consume.\u00a0 The 19th novel in this series is no exception, and this installment finds Lady Emily in 1907 London, being asked (along with her dashing husband) to … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2292,2293,278,100,1276,93,275,2291],"class_list":["post-6703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-1902-london","tag-debutantes","tag-lady-emily","tag-minotaur-books","tag-robin-agnew","tag-suffragettes","tag-tasha-alexander","tag-the-sisterhood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6703"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6704,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6703\/revisions\/6704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}