Monday, December 28, 2015

2015 book 303

Carola Dunn's Miss Jacobson's Journey
On the one hand, hooray for Regency romances with Jewish characters! On the other, nothing much happens in this one, even though a plot summary makes it sound exciting: a young British Jewish woman meets her intended, takes one look, says NOPE, and decides to accompany her uncle to Europe to assist him with his medical research. Now it's like nine years later and her uncle has died, buttttt she can't just go home b/c there's a war with Napoleon! Somehow the Rothschild brothers convince her to accompany two British dudes who are smuggling gold to Wellington (she has good language skills)--one a handsome young anti-Semitic lord, and the other . . . her former intended, who is now hot. But then they just like ride around in a carriage for a while and have conversations, it's kind of dull. The depictions of Jews are also a little weird to this Jewish reader--I am one hundred percent certain that the author is not Jewish. I mean, they're positive depictions, which is nice, but it's all a little . . . romanticized? I believe this series predates Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple books, or at least, those are slightly more entertaining. Still, yay Jewish characters. B.

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