Book Review: “Manners and Monsters: Book One” by Tilly Wallace
Manners and Monsters
Tilly Wallace
Oh this was a lot of fun. Manners and Monsters gives us Regency Romance vibes combined with Horror, and it works so bloody well. It’s clear Wallace knows the genres she’s playing around with, and utilises the best parts for Hannah’s story. She combines the tropes from Regency Romance with those from Urban Fantasy, creating the kind of Historical Fantasy world I am loving more and more. If there’s to be a comparison, it’s with the recent Half a Soul and the older Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. There’s also shades of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but similarly to Half a Soul that mainly comes about from the time period it’s set in, the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, and the use of magic during this fascinating period of history.
And whether it’s Horror, Fantasy, Romance or a combination, it’s easy to see why the British Regency period is so fascinating. It’s long been a huge subgenre within Romance of course, and it fits really well in Historical Fantasy. This could be a whole essay on this, but instead I’ll tell you why I enjoyed Manners and Monsters so much.
Hannah lives with her parents, away from the ton and the London scene. She’s given up on hoping to meet a husband, content to work with her scientist father and care for her afflicted mother. For a strange disease has struck many of the women – and some of the men – of the ton, dividing England in its responses and treatment to the not-quite-dead nobility. While her parents search for a cure, Hannah attends her best friend’s engagement party. And when a murder is committed at the party, Hannah is drawn into the investigation, mostly to apologise for Viscount Wycliff’s rude behaviour towards the members of the ton.
Manners and Monsters verges on Urban Fantasy territory, in that procedural crime sort of way – MC with some link to the paranormal gets drawn into investigating a crime committed by a paranormal creature, usually paired up with someone attractive they don’t really get along with, but it’s only together they can solve the crime. It’s a formula that can work really well in the hands of a good author, and it definitely works here, giving us plenty of entertainment between Hannah and the viscount.
Throughout, he makes his feelings on the paranormal quite clear. This is a world where the humans live alongside magic, where the wars have been fought with mages, and through the book we get a more firm idea of how this magic works, largely through Hannah’s mother.
The one thing that annoyed me was the repetition, and it made it feel like the book could have done with more trimming. Hannah very often refers back to how she will be single forever, and occasionally she’s at peace with that, but mostly she’s bemoaning it. It felt strained at times, maybe because it was mentioned so much. It’s understandable in this time period that a young woman would fret over marriage prospects, but this got to be too much and felt too contradictory. Yet there was also a slight too much leaning on the “not like other girls” ideas. At times – and this isn’t just in this book – some Regency books do tend to lean too much on the character being ‘outside’ society, and too ‘modern’ to really fit in. It comes a little with the territory, but not every woman MC needs to be like this, and if they are we don’t, as readers, need the point hammered home. For my personal preference, if the MC is somehow ‘different’ from what is expected of them, I like when they can encounter other women in similar situations.
But that was all that bugged me really, and outside of these points I really did enjoy the novel. It’s a fun combination of genres that blends them together well and does a great job of keeping the reader engaged.
Review by Elle Turpitt
Twitter & Instagram: @elleturpitt
I received this ebook via Amazon
