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The Worth Saga #3
The Devil Comes Courting
Captain Grayson Hunter knows the battle to complete the first worldwide telegraphic network will be fierce, and he intends to win it by any means necessary. When he hears about a reclusive genius who has figured out how to slash the cost of telegraphic transmissions, he vows to do whatever it takes to get the man in his employ.
Except the reclusive genius is not a man, and she’s not looking for employment.
Amelia Smith was born in Shanghai, and taken in by English missionaries. She’s not interested in Captain Hunter’s promises or his ambitions. But the harder he tries to convince her, the more she realizes that there is something she wants from him: She wants everything. And she’ll have to crack the frozen shell he’s made of his heart to get it.
Except the reclusive genius is not a man, and she’s not looking for employment.
Amelia Smith was born in Shanghai, and taken in by English missionaries. She’s not interested in Captain Hunter’s promises or his ambitions. But the harder he tries to convince her, the more she realizes that there is something she wants from him: She wants everything. And she’ll have to crack the frozen shell he’s made of his heart to get it.
420 pages, Paperback
First published April 20, 2021
160 people are currently reading
3959 people want to read
About the author
Courtney Milan
68 books5,490 followersCourtney Milan writes books about carriages, corsets, and smartwatches. Her books have received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist. She is a New York Times and a USA Today Bestseller.
Courtney pens a weekly newsletter about tea, books, and basically anything and everything else. Sign up for it here: https://bit.ly/CourtneysTea
Before she started writing romance, Courtney got a graduate degree in theoretical physical chemistry from UC Berkeley. After that, just to shake things up, she went to law school at the University of Michigan and graduated summa cum laude. Then she did a handful of clerkships. She was a law professor for a while. She now writes full-time.
Courtney is represented by Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Literary Agency.
Courtney pens a weekly newsletter about tea, books, and basically anything and everything else. Sign up for it here: https://bit.ly/CourtneysTea
Before she started writing romance, Courtney got a graduate degree in theoretical physical chemistry from UC Berkeley. After that, just to shake things up, she went to law school at the University of Michigan and graduated summa cum laude. Then she did a handful of clerkships. She was a law professor for a while. She now writes full-time.
Courtney is represented by Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Literary Agency.
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September 7, 2021on pause at the moment because i've had one quirky heroine too many lately. i have high hopes that i'll return to this at the perfect moment and be swept off my feet but rn i can't do it
April 29, 2021
(4.5 stars) I almost did not read this latest Milan entry in her Worth Saga series. Although I admire her social conscience and share her outrage over racism, bigotry, sexism and xenophobia, Milan's romances with those underlying themes have felt preachy and about as subtle as a sledgehammer. Well, maybe I'm getting used to her or maybe this one just clicked with me.
Third in the Worth Saga, this one takes place in the early 1870s, after the American Civil War in which three brothers of our hero, Grayson Hunter, were killed. Adrian, the youngest Hunter brother, you may remember, if you're a Milan fan, as the hero of AFTER THE WEDDING, Worth Saga #2. He's the only one of the five sons of an English duke's daughter and a Black abolitionist who lives in England, taking care of the family's pottery business there.
(BTW, characters featured in this story have ties either to the Hunter or the Worth families. I mention this because Worth Saga #1 came out in 2015 and because of all the HRs I've read since then I needed a bit of a refresher about these characters. So our connection to the Worth family here is that Adrian Turner is married to Camilla Worth and Camilla's brother Benedict Worth is an employee of Grayson Hunter.)
But this is a story mainly about two somewhat lost souls: Captain Grayson Hunter and Amelia Smith. Grayson is a tortured man, in a way, suffering from survivor's guilt because, out of the four Hunter brothers who participated in the Civil War, he is the only one still living. Now he's on a mission, to complete the telegraph line he and his brothers had always dreamed of building. He wants to connect Shanghai to the U.S., but to do this he needs a workable Chinese telegraphic code, something that has been elusive. He has been told about a certain "Silver Fox" in Fuzhou who has already invented a partial code and he sets off to find and hire him.
So, yes, this Silver Fox is actually our heroine, a young Asian woman who was adopted at the age of six by a white missionary family in China. Oh, how lovely and kind of that missionary family, you may think? Once upon a time, growing up the daughter of a Protestant minister, I would have. We children even had to recite the line "and bless the Christian missionaries all over the world and keep them safe and from all harm and danger" as part of our nightly prayers.
But that's until I grew up and realized that, in the name of Christian proselytizing, missionaries steal away a people's identity, their language, religion and culture, their way of life, and try to replace it with the white man's "superior" versions. (Research what mission schools here in the U.S. did to Native American children in the 1800s and weep.)
But never mind that. I'm preaching more than Milan did in this book. She was not at all heavy-handed here in dealing with injustices, although she does allow us to see some of the racism Grayson faces as a biracial Black man in a monoracial white-controlled world and all that Amelia has to face as an Asian woman trying to live in the white world, almost losing her identity in her desire to fit in and be accepted.
But, fortunately, these two find each other and find healing. Amelia leaves her white family to accept employment in Shanghai, working for Grayson to perfect that Chinese telegraphic code. Along the way to inventing that code, she finds herself and her roots and her pride, realizing her self-worth and not allowing herself to be put down by others, especially not by her adoptive mother and the white missionary circle.
And Captain Hunter? He will need to forgive himself and lose his feelings of guilt about being the only one of four brothers to survive the Civil War. He will need to learn to love himself and also to realize that he is loved by his family.
This is a love story with two very appealing characters. It takes place over a period of maybe two years, and during most of that time they are separated, with Grayson out on the ocean laying cable and Amelia back in Shanghai creating Chinese code. Their methods of communication with each other are remarkably romantic and cleverly done. And who would have thought that mention of gutta percha and megalodons would be so entertaining? All in all, this new Milan was a success, IMO.
Third in the Worth Saga, this one takes place in the early 1870s, after the American Civil War in which three brothers of our hero, Grayson Hunter, were killed. Adrian, the youngest Hunter brother, you may remember, if you're a Milan fan, as the hero of AFTER THE WEDDING, Worth Saga #2. He's the only one of the five sons of an English duke's daughter and a Black abolitionist who lives in England, taking care of the family's pottery business there.
(BTW, characters featured in this story have ties either to the Hunter or the Worth families. I mention this because Worth Saga #1 came out in 2015 and because of all the HRs I've read since then I needed a bit of a refresher about these characters. So our connection to the Worth family here is that Adrian Turner is married to Camilla Worth and Camilla's brother Benedict Worth is an employee of Grayson Hunter.)
But this is a story mainly about two somewhat lost souls: Captain Grayson Hunter and Amelia Smith. Grayson is a tortured man, in a way, suffering from survivor's guilt because, out of the four Hunter brothers who participated in the Civil War, he is the only one still living. Now he's on a mission, to complete the telegraph line he and his brothers had always dreamed of building. He wants to connect Shanghai to the U.S., but to do this he needs a workable Chinese telegraphic code, something that has been elusive. He has been told about a certain "Silver Fox" in Fuzhou who has already invented a partial code and he sets off to find and hire him.
So, yes, this Silver Fox is actually our heroine, a young Asian woman who was adopted at the age of six by a white missionary family in China. Oh, how lovely and kind of that missionary family, you may think? Once upon a time, growing up the daughter of a Protestant minister, I would have. We children even had to recite the line "and bless the Christian missionaries all over the world and keep them safe and from all harm and danger" as part of our nightly prayers.
But that's until I grew up and realized that, in the name of Christian proselytizing, missionaries steal away a people's identity, their language, religion and culture, their way of life, and try to replace it with the white man's "superior" versions. (Research what mission schools here in the U.S. did to Native American children in the 1800s and weep.)
But never mind that. I'm preaching more than Milan did in this book. She was not at all heavy-handed here in dealing with injustices, although she does allow us to see some of the racism Grayson faces as a biracial Black man in a monoracial white-controlled world and all that Amelia has to face as an Asian woman trying to live in the white world, almost losing her identity in her desire to fit in and be accepted.
But, fortunately, these two find each other and find healing. Amelia leaves her white family to accept employment in Shanghai, working for Grayson to perfect that Chinese telegraphic code. Along the way to inventing that code, she finds herself and her roots and her pride, realizing her self-worth and not allowing herself to be put down by others, especially not by her adoptive mother and the white missionary circle.
And Captain Hunter? He will need to forgive himself and lose his feelings of guilt about being the only one of four brothers to survive the Civil War. He will need to learn to love himself and also to realize that he is loved by his family.
This is a love story with two very appealing characters. It takes place over a period of maybe two years, and during most of that time they are separated, with Grayson out on the ocean laying cable and Amelia back in Shanghai creating Chinese code. Their methods of communication with each other are remarkably romantic and cleverly done. And who would have thought that mention of gutta percha and megalodons would be so entertaining? All in all, this new Milan was a success, IMO.
April 19, 2021
TW: grief over death of a loved one, racism, gaslighting
My heart is so full now.
I love love love this story so much. Now that I've finished the book, Courtney Milan's storytelling skills amazed me, and I don't know why I was so surprised by it--this isn't my first Courtney book.
I adore Amelia so much. She's so wholesome and smart, and I love all her quirks. I love how she conquered her imposter syndrome (truly inspiring, I am jotting down notes here), how she became more confident in her skin after removing herself from her mother's house (and abusive environment, tbh).
Grayson, where do I start with Grayson? Dude needs a hug, badly. I adore his smart brains and how he takes care of Amelia, how he encourages her to trust herself. The way he always thought of his brothers with every accomplishment he made broke my heart.
There are so many elements of this book that work for me, but ultimately it boils down to the characters. Amelia and Grayson are surrounded by so many wonderful people (and one Benedict Worth, grown up and far away from home!), their love for each other and their banter are truly heartwarming.
Looking forward to the next book (which might take another 2 years but anyhoo this will give me time to reread the previous Worth books because I remember nothing)!
E-ARC is received thanks to the author.
My heart is so full now.
I love love love this story so much. Now that I've finished the book, Courtney Milan's storytelling skills amazed me, and I don't know why I was so surprised by it--this isn't my first Courtney book.
I adore Amelia so much. She's so wholesome and smart, and I love all her quirks. I love how she conquered her imposter syndrome (truly inspiring, I am jotting down notes here), how she became more confident in her skin after removing herself from her mother's house (and abusive environment, tbh).
Grayson, where do I start with Grayson? Dude needs a hug, badly. I adore his smart brains and how he takes care of Amelia, how he encourages her to trust herself. The way he always thought of his brothers with every accomplishment he made broke my heart.
There are so many elements of this book that work for me, but ultimately it boils down to the characters. Amelia and Grayson are surrounded by so many wonderful people (and one Benedict Worth, grown up and far away from home!), their love for each other and their banter are truly heartwarming.
Looking forward to the next book (which might take another 2 years but anyhoo this will give me time to reread the previous Worth books because I remember nothing)!
E-ARC is received thanks to the author.
October 30, 2021
More books like this please.
I took a long time to read this. That was mostly because I have not been reading much, but I was not bored or disinterested in this book. The nice thing about it that it was so unique that it was easy to pick back up and know what was going on. I also enjoyed savoring it. Definitely my favorite of the series. Unlike the previous books, this one felt meticulously written rather than labored.
Both Amelia and Grayson were well drawn and sympathetic characters. I truly enjoyed reading about them. Quite a bit of time passes during the course of reading this book, and there is probably more time spent apart than together, and that was handled well.
I took a long time to read this. That was mostly because I have not been reading much, but I was not bored or disinterested in this book. The nice thing about it that it was so unique that it was easy to pick back up and know what was going on. I also enjoyed savoring it. Definitely my favorite of the series. Unlike the previous books, this one felt meticulously written rather than labored.
Both Amelia and Grayson were well drawn and sympathetic characters. I truly enjoyed reading about them. Quite a bit of time passes during the course of reading this book, and there is probably more time spent apart than together, and that was handled well.
April 24, 2021
"His arm came around her waist, holding her in place. She could hear the lapping of the waves against the ship, the call of gulls, the buzz of the docks. He kissed her on and on until time disappeared and the sadness in her chest lightened".
Three years after After the wedding and multiple changes of release dates, The devil comes courting can (eventually) be read and enjoyed... The three years of waiting for this next instalment in the Worth sage were not in vain as this romance will take you on a quest to forgiveness, families, a journey of a true honest romance and the rewritten story of the telegraphic line linking two continents…
Knowing a little from what Courtney shared of the story and her process writing it and all the debates and the events in « romancelandia » in the last years, i had some expectations about this book. I thought it would feel a little a raw and tough (as opposed to a softer text) and that the subjects of race and racism would elevate the text from its romance purpose to a statement novel. I was wrong on both account and it underlines even more what Courtney said on twitter on the release of this book : an author will write the text that she/he wants or needs to write. Yes the story is intertwined with statements about race and shows various forms of racism and it also has characters developments on grief and depression but the story never loses the romance, which is at its core. In fact, the romance story is enriched with these ideas and these points. Grayson and Amelia’s characters and their fight have more depth, more authenticity, and therefore are more compelling because their path feel connected to the reality of our current world.
Fantasy historical romances are delicious as it provides a welcome ridiculousness that brightens the heart of the reader. The joy these romances provide are important and are needed more often than we think. However, the engagement with the story and the growth a reader can take from these, is sometimes limited. Not to say that romance authors should constantly endorse the role of teachers but i believe that books in general, novels in specific are means to broaden knowledge, to create curiosity, to challenge ideas. Under gorgeous covers (quick interruption but the cover of book three is my favorite) and with a delicate enticing prose, novels are the most subtle weapon against ignorance, prejudice and narrow-mindedness. To me, The devil comes courting is the perfect example of how Courtney used her incredible story telling (i adore all the little trivia and knowledge with which she always infused her stories), her talent to write romance (more on that in a second) to bring the light to important ideas, facts and feelings by linking them to characters and a gorgeous romance to amplify their resonance.
"The storm was here. He thought he’d insulated his heart, but a few inches of rubber were nothing for a bolt of energy that could cross the heavens. He didn’t want to feel this. This yearning. This want. This desire to keep her safe, this connection. He didn’t want it. He had known something was going wrong, that there was danger, but he’d justified all his conversation with her as business. Telling himself it couldn’t hurt. He should have recognized the danger he was in. He should have protected his heart better. How could he have? He hadn’t realized he still had one".
Our hero is Grayson, who’s fighting his grief for his brothers killed during the war by making their shared dreams into reality : building a telegraphic line connecting America to China. Searching for someone clever enough to find a code for the Chinese language, he finds our heroine Amelia, a Chinese woman raised in an english household after being adopted by a missionary couple. She accepts his offer of employment, not only to escape another loveless and despicable marriage offer and for the intellectual challenge of it but also because Captain Grayson is a hot piece of a romance hero (and he knows so) and a true softie (he literally bought her a dog a few days about meeting her!!!). This telegraphic adventure will take them on a personal journey challenging them to listen to their hearts and know the truth of their feelings in order to find their lost family and accept their own path in life.
The romance of Amelia and Grayson is not the courting one nor the angsty kind. It’s about the truth of their feelings, a deep connection of trust and a fiery attraction. Their paths cross each other as they work together on their telegraphic line but they are also often apart. Their romance is therefore built by dialogues when they share some scenes but also by their feelings growing when they are apart and by all the way they can communicate, words, codes, actions but most of all, a strong faith in each other and in their feelings. Courtney’s talent for writing romance offered extremely delicate and beautiful romantic lines…
I think about you sometimes at night, she confessed. And in the day. I think about coming to your bed in an unsteady sea. I think about kissing your lips while the rocking of the ship tries to tear us apart, about finding a rhythm with you when the world is rough around us. I think about how you would have the superior pace from years of being at sea—how you would establish a rhythm that would allow us to ride the waves as I rode you.
In addition to this moving romance, we got glimpses of Benedict Worth and his own quest to find his path in life, and met intriguing side characters such as the second Captain Hunter, Leland or Auntie Zhu. I also enjoyed all the description of Shanghai and Honk-Kong that Courtney wrote as they were vibrant with sounds, smells and so lively!
Just writing this review and collecting some of my favorite lines make me want to read it again, to embrace again little details of the story and the romance… Who knows when book four will be released but Courtney Milan proved that to wait three years was worth it so i will (im)patiently wait for it.
* * *
april 2021 : I AM FULL OF EMOTIONS
february 2021 : yes still here, still waiting and wondering if i will haunt this world if this romance is not released before i die
august 2020 : did i not ask courtney milan to save this year? i can't wait for more news on the release of this one and very happy about courtney's getting back in the game with joy and control
april 2020 : new release date is mid-june of this year... if this book is released this year, 2020 would look completely differently, it would be like a plot twist in the middle of season 3 of a show, where the first half was shitty but it gets better in the second half but then, if not, 2020 will still continue to disappoint, you feel me?
may 2018 : TIME TO EITHER GO PLAY WITH DR STRANGE AND MAKE HIM USE THE TIME STONE OR JUST GET COMFY INTO AN ICE MACHINE WITH BEARDED CAP AMERICA
Three years after After the wedding and multiple changes of release dates, The devil comes courting can (eventually) be read and enjoyed... The three years of waiting for this next instalment in the Worth sage were not in vain as this romance will take you on a quest to forgiveness, families, a journey of a true honest romance and the rewritten story of the telegraphic line linking two continents…
Knowing a little from what Courtney shared of the story and her process writing it and all the debates and the events in « romancelandia » in the last years, i had some expectations about this book. I thought it would feel a little a raw and tough (as opposed to a softer text) and that the subjects of race and racism would elevate the text from its romance purpose to a statement novel. I was wrong on both account and it underlines even more what Courtney said on twitter on the release of this book : an author will write the text that she/he wants or needs to write. Yes the story is intertwined with statements about race and shows various forms of racism and it also has characters developments on grief and depression but the story never loses the romance, which is at its core. In fact, the romance story is enriched with these ideas and these points. Grayson and Amelia’s characters and their fight have more depth, more authenticity, and therefore are more compelling because their path feel connected to the reality of our current world.
Fantasy historical romances are delicious as it provides a welcome ridiculousness that brightens the heart of the reader. The joy these romances provide are important and are needed more often than we think. However, the engagement with the story and the growth a reader can take from these, is sometimes limited. Not to say that romance authors should constantly endorse the role of teachers but i believe that books in general, novels in specific are means to broaden knowledge, to create curiosity, to challenge ideas. Under gorgeous covers (quick interruption but the cover of book three is my favorite) and with a delicate enticing prose, novels are the most subtle weapon against ignorance, prejudice and narrow-mindedness. To me, The devil comes courting is the perfect example of how Courtney used her incredible story telling (i adore all the little trivia and knowledge with which she always infused her stories), her talent to write romance (more on that in a second) to bring the light to important ideas, facts and feelings by linking them to characters and a gorgeous romance to amplify their resonance.
"The storm was here. He thought he’d insulated his heart, but a few inches of rubber were nothing for a bolt of energy that could cross the heavens. He didn’t want to feel this. This yearning. This want. This desire to keep her safe, this connection. He didn’t want it. He had known something was going wrong, that there was danger, but he’d justified all his conversation with her as business. Telling himself it couldn’t hurt. He should have recognized the danger he was in. He should have protected his heart better. How could he have? He hadn’t realized he still had one".
Our hero is Grayson, who’s fighting his grief for his brothers killed during the war by making their shared dreams into reality : building a telegraphic line connecting America to China. Searching for someone clever enough to find a code for the Chinese language, he finds our heroine Amelia, a Chinese woman raised in an english household after being adopted by a missionary couple. She accepts his offer of employment, not only to escape another loveless and despicable marriage offer and for the intellectual challenge of it but also because Captain Grayson is a hot piece of a romance hero (and he knows so) and a true softie (he literally bought her a dog a few days about meeting her!!!). This telegraphic adventure will take them on a personal journey challenging them to listen to their hearts and know the truth of their feelings in order to find their lost family and accept their own path in life.
The romance of Amelia and Grayson is not the courting one nor the angsty kind. It’s about the truth of their feelings, a deep connection of trust and a fiery attraction. Their paths cross each other as they work together on their telegraphic line but they are also often apart. Their romance is therefore built by dialogues when they share some scenes but also by their feelings growing when they are apart and by all the way they can communicate, words, codes, actions but most of all, a strong faith in each other and in their feelings. Courtney’s talent for writing romance offered extremely delicate and beautiful romantic lines…
I think about you sometimes at night, she confessed. And in the day. I think about coming to your bed in an unsteady sea. I think about kissing your lips while the rocking of the ship tries to tear us apart, about finding a rhythm with you when the world is rough around us. I think about how you would have the superior pace from years of being at sea—how you would establish a rhythm that would allow us to ride the waves as I rode you.
In addition to this moving romance, we got glimpses of Benedict Worth and his own quest to find his path in life, and met intriguing side characters such as the second Captain Hunter, Leland or Auntie Zhu. I also enjoyed all the description of Shanghai and Honk-Kong that Courtney wrote as they were vibrant with sounds, smells and so lively!
Just writing this review and collecting some of my favorite lines make me want to read it again, to embrace again little details of the story and the romance… Who knows when book four will be released but Courtney Milan proved that to wait three years was worth it so i will (im)patiently wait for it.
* * *
april 2021 : I AM FULL OF EMOTIONS
february 2021 : yes still here, still waiting and wondering if i will haunt this world if this romance is not released before i die
august 2020 : did i not ask courtney milan to save this year? i can't wait for more news on the release of this one and very happy about courtney's getting back in the game with joy and control
april 2020 : new release date is mid-june of this year... if this book is released this year, 2020 would look completely differently, it would be like a plot twist in the middle of season 3 of a show, where the first half was shitty but it gets better in the second half but then, if not, 2020 will still continue to disappoint, you feel me?
may 2018 : TIME TO EITHER GO PLAY WITH DR STRANGE AND MAKE HIM USE THE TIME STONE OR JUST GET COMFY INTO AN ICE MACHINE WITH BEARDED CAP AMERICA
Want to read
April 19, 2021Nearly six years after I put this on my TBR list, I just found out on Twitter that tomorrow (April 20, 2021) is the release date.
April 20, 2021
best courtney milan book so far i think
Rep: Black mc, Chinese mc, gay side character
CWs: racism, gaslighting, (perceived) abandonment by parent
Rep: Black mc, Chinese mc, gay side character
CWs: racism, gaslighting, (perceived) abandonment by parent
June 24, 2021
**30 Books in 30 Days**
Book 19/30
The wait was incredibly worth it on this one. We waited years, and this is by far the best full novel in this series (the novella In Pursuit Of . . . is wonderful, too).
First of all, according to the author's notes of this book, Courtney Milan is literally the reason there is a dinosaur emoji. Second of all, she actually created the Chinese telegraphic code in the book (the theory of it, anyway). Like, whAt? (Those two things are related by the way. The dinosaur emoji helped her crack the Chinese telegraphic code. Again, wHaT.) Neither of those things is relevant to enjoying the book, but I had to mention them anyway.
Of actual relevance is the plot, which features Captain Grayson Hunter in his quest to lay telegraphic line across the world seeking out "The Silver Fox", who is the only person he's heard of who might be able to help him create a workable Chinese telegraphic code. When Hunter arrives in Fuzhou, he finds that the Silver Fox is a woman, a widow named Mrs. Amelia Smith, and her brother thinks she is being "criminally underutilized." Amelia Smith is also Chinese, but was adopted by Mrs. Acheson when she was very young, along with her older brother (who is white) Leland. It quickly becomes apparent that not only is she underutilized, she is treated terribly by her mother, who professes to love her, but belittles her Chinese heritage and displays some pretty racist tendencies. Amelia, who doesn't remember her life before Mrs. Acheson was her mother, has absorbed some pretty toxic ideas. On top of that, she's a genius, and I would say neuroatypical. Grayson badly wants her to come work for him, but it takes some convincing. Amelia isn't aware that she is worth very much at all.
What sets this one apart for me is that first of all, it's set almost entirely in a historically accurate China that I've not really seen portrayed in romance novels before. It also takes place over a much longer period of time than your average romance. Years. I appreciated this so much. Not only does it give our characters more time to actually get to know one another, it's just more realistic. Feelings grow over years, people grow and change over years. In practical terms, it takes time for Amelia to develop the code and to relearn how to experience the world when not being oppressed by her mother.
This ties in to the saga of the Worth family in a fun way. Young Benedict is employed by Grayson, and he's told his family he's out in the world to search his missing sister, Theresa, but really he has absolutely no intention of doing so, or ever returning to England. Benedict spends most of the novel liaising for Amelia and pretending to search for Theresa. I'm very excited to see more of the two of them in the next book, and interested to find out what his book will eventually be about.
[4.5 stars]
Book 19/30
The wait was incredibly worth it on this one. We waited years, and this is by far the best full novel in this series (the novella In Pursuit Of . . . is wonderful, too).
First of all, according to the author's notes of this book, Courtney Milan is literally the reason there is a dinosaur emoji. Second of all, she actually created the Chinese telegraphic code in the book (the theory of it, anyway). Like, whAt? (Those two things are related by the way. The dinosaur emoji helped her crack the Chinese telegraphic code. Again, wHaT.) Neither of those things is relevant to enjoying the book, but I had to mention them anyway.
Of actual relevance is the plot, which features Captain Grayson Hunter in his quest to lay telegraphic line across the world seeking out "The Silver Fox", who is the only person he's heard of who might be able to help him create a workable Chinese telegraphic code. When Hunter arrives in Fuzhou, he finds that the Silver Fox is a woman, a widow named Mrs. Amelia Smith, and her brother thinks she is being "criminally underutilized." Amelia Smith is also Chinese, but was adopted by Mrs. Acheson when she was very young, along with her older brother (who is white) Leland. It quickly becomes apparent that not only is she underutilized, she is treated terribly by her mother, who professes to love her, but belittles her Chinese heritage and displays some pretty racist tendencies. Amelia, who doesn't remember her life before Mrs. Acheson was her mother, has absorbed some pretty toxic ideas. On top of that, she's a genius, and I would say neuroatypical. Grayson badly wants her to come work for him, but it takes some convincing. Amelia isn't aware that she is worth very much at all.
What sets this one apart for me is that first of all, it's set almost entirely in a historically accurate China that I've not really seen portrayed in romance novels before. It also takes place over a much longer period of time than your average romance. Years. I appreciated this so much. Not only does it give our characters more time to actually get to know one another, it's just more realistic. Feelings grow over years, people grow and change over years. In practical terms, it takes time for Amelia to develop the code and to relearn how to experience the world when not being oppressed by her mother.
This ties in to the saga of the Worth family in a fun way. Young Benedict is employed by Grayson, and he's told his family he's out in the world to search his missing sister, Theresa, but really he has absolutely no intention of doing so, or ever returning to England. Benedict spends most of the novel liaising for Amelia and pretending to search for Theresa. I'm very excited to see more of the two of them in the next book, and interested to find out what his book will eventually be about.
[4.5 stars]
May 20, 2021
I’m a pretty die hard fan of Courtney Milan and to absolutely no one’s shock, I adored this book.
One of my favorite tropes in romance is competence porn, wherein a main character does something and does that thing really, really well, is smart and capable and just good at doing whatever it is that they do.
Amelia (Mrs. Smith) is one such person. She is the female main character in this book (FMC) and she is brilliant, kind of a daydreamer, and laughably bad at remembering names.
Grayson Hunter, who we met in a previous book in this series, is ambitious and trying to revolutionize the way telegraphs are sent. Basically, he wants it to be accessible to all people, everywhere.
The two meet because Grayson wants to hire Amelia to invent a telegraphic method for transmitting Chinese characters.
Amelia, Chinese born but raised by the English woman who took her in, has been told all her life that she’s less than. Unable to fit into British society but too far removed from her Chinese heritage, she has struggled to find a place to belong. I loved her, I related hard to her and her struggle with self-identity, her journey really moved me.
A lot of this book involves the FMC and MMC far removed from each other, often on opposite sides of the world for months on end. There is an unique epistolary component to this book that manages to bridge this distance in a way that is both charming and unusual and delightful.
The thing I loved the most about this book (aside from Amelia and Grayson and the side characters) is that while Amelia is brilliant, she lacks confidence. And the way Grayson goes about giving that confidence back to her, making her believe in herself and her capabilities, is so damn wonderful, it brought tears to my eyes. There is not one single moment where Grayson ever doubts or questions or dismisses Amelia. He totally and utterly believes in her from the outset, is determined that only she holds the key to his problems.
There is a secondary storyline with Amelia and her parentage and the idea of white saviorism that is incredibly well-done, accurately rendered with great nuance. I don’t want to give too much away but it’s brilliant and the ending is so good, so perfect, I just really, really want everyone to read this book and love it as much as I do.
One of my favorite tropes in romance is competence porn, wherein a main character does something and does that thing really, really well, is smart and capable and just good at doing whatever it is that they do.
Amelia (Mrs. Smith) is one such person. She is the female main character in this book (FMC) and she is brilliant, kind of a daydreamer, and laughably bad at remembering names.
Grayson Hunter, who we met in a previous book in this series, is ambitious and trying to revolutionize the way telegraphs are sent. Basically, he wants it to be accessible to all people, everywhere.
The two meet because Grayson wants to hire Amelia to invent a telegraphic method for transmitting Chinese characters.
Amelia, Chinese born but raised by the English woman who took her in, has been told all her life that she’s less than. Unable to fit into British society but too far removed from her Chinese heritage, she has struggled to find a place to belong. I loved her, I related hard to her and her struggle with self-identity, her journey really moved me.
A lot of this book involves the FMC and MMC far removed from each other, often on opposite sides of the world for months on end. There is an unique epistolary component to this book that manages to bridge this distance in a way that is both charming and unusual and delightful.
The thing I loved the most about this book (aside from Amelia and Grayson and the side characters) is that while Amelia is brilliant, she lacks confidence. And the way Grayson goes about giving that confidence back to her, making her believe in herself and her capabilities, is so damn wonderful, it brought tears to my eyes. There is not one single moment where Grayson ever doubts or questions or dismisses Amelia. He totally and utterly believes in her from the outset, is determined that only she holds the key to his problems.
There is a secondary storyline with Amelia and her parentage and the idea of white saviorism that is incredibly well-done, accurately rendered with great nuance. I don’t want to give too much away but it’s brilliant and the ending is so good, so perfect, I just really, really want everyone to read this book and love it as much as I do.
May 1, 2021
Mostly China 1870. Not a 'cookie-cutter' story.
Grayson, a successful black businessman & former Civil War
officer, was overdue to visit his folks in Maine. Gray's late
brothers & he planned to create a transpacific telegraph line.
While in China, someone directed Gray to seek the genius of
"the Silver Fox," who he assumed was a man. Not so. It
turned out to be Amelia, an Asian lady born in China, &
raised by English missionary foster parents in China. When
Amelia was age 6, onward. Amelia's Chinese mom, who she
referred to as Ah Ma, promised to return for her. Would she?
Gray offered adult Amelia a job, to create a Chinese telegraph
code. She'd formerly worked for a telegraph co. & displayed
absent-mindedness IE forgot names easily, but had flashes
of new ideas. Am's foster mom wanted to constrict/ control
Amelia, now a widow. Her foster brother, Leland, worked in
Hong Kong. Amelia experienced racism + did not feel she fit
in with English or Chinese culture. A tea shop owner later
made her feel more comfortable appreciating both cultures.
Amelia worked in Shanghai, while Gray supervised the
laying of telegraph cable at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
They saw each other months apart. They communicated via
ship telegraph to a large city (w/ telegraph) to shore tele-
graph she helped design.
This author writes good stories with real characters with real
emotions. I don't want to give away 'spoilers.' The MCs were
a loving couple, so happy to be together after long periods apart.
Grayson, a successful black businessman & former Civil War
officer, was overdue to visit his folks in Maine. Gray's late
brothers & he planned to create a transpacific telegraph line.
While in China, someone directed Gray to seek the genius of
"the Silver Fox," who he assumed was a man. Not so. It
turned out to be Amelia, an Asian lady born in China, &
raised by English missionary foster parents in China. When
Amelia was age 6, onward. Amelia's Chinese mom, who she
referred to as Ah Ma, promised to return for her. Would she?
Gray offered adult Amelia a job, to create a Chinese telegraph
code. She'd formerly worked for a telegraph co. & displayed
absent-mindedness IE forgot names easily, but had flashes
of new ideas. Am's foster mom wanted to constrict/ control
Amelia, now a widow. Her foster brother, Leland, worked in
Hong Kong. Amelia experienced racism + did not feel she fit
in with English or Chinese culture. A tea shop owner later
made her feel more comfortable appreciating both cultures.
Amelia worked in Shanghai, while Gray supervised the
laying of telegraph cable at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
They saw each other months apart. They communicated via
ship telegraph to a large city (w/ telegraph) to shore tele-
graph she helped design.
This author writes good stories with real characters with real
emotions. I don't want to give away 'spoilers.' The MCs were
a loving couple, so happy to be together after long periods apart.
December 8, 2021
I received a review copy of this book courtesy of the Author; my opinion is my own.
I am at a loss for words to describe what this book is like. I've been waiting for its publication for a while, and based on the excerpt included in one of the earlier books, I expected intense chemistry between the main characters. The Devil Comes Courting definitely had that, but I soon realised that chemistry was only a fraction of what this novel was about, and its themes resonated with me on a deeply personal level.
Amelia and Grayson are a lovely couple. Amelia is distinctly neurodivergent, and trained to self-deprecate rather than use her skills to her advantage, in ways both instantly recognisable and specific; this aspect is written with so much care and respect. Grayson has been depressed (and grieving unhealthily) for so long it feels like the normal way to be. That does not prevent them from cherishing and supporting each other. I enjoyed reading about their mutual affection, attraction and gestures of love, and appreciated how they were capable of them even before their healing was complete (love is not only for the un-broken). I adored the way in which they opened each other up to negative emotions as a way to becoming more open to joy and love. And I loved the way in which the plot relied on real and external rather than manufactured obligatory conflict.
I also loved the way Milan wrote about their families. There are many aspects I connected with - parental abandonment, abuse disguised as love, sibling death - and their portrayal was poignant, touching and never sensationalist. No false note was detected.
My only complaint might be that there wasn't more about the dog.
I am at a loss for words to describe what this book is like. I've been waiting for its publication for a while, and based on the excerpt included in one of the earlier books, I expected intense chemistry between the main characters. The Devil Comes Courting definitely had that, but I soon realised that chemistry was only a fraction of what this novel was about, and its themes resonated with me on a deeply personal level.
Amelia and Grayson are a lovely couple. Amelia is distinctly neurodivergent, and trained to self-deprecate rather than use her skills to her advantage, in ways both instantly recognisable and specific; this aspect is written with so much care and respect. Grayson has been depressed (and grieving unhealthily) for so long it feels like the normal way to be. That does not prevent them from cherishing and supporting each other. I enjoyed reading about their mutual affection, attraction and gestures of love, and appreciated how they were capable of them even before their healing was complete (love is not only for the un-broken). I adored the way in which they opened each other up to negative emotions as a way to becoming more open to joy and love. And I loved the way in which the plot relied on real and external rather than manufactured obligatory conflict.
I also loved the way Milan wrote about their families. There are many aspects I connected with - parental abandonment, abuse disguised as love, sibling death - and their portrayal was poignant, touching and never sensationalist. No false note was detected.
My only complaint might be that there wasn't more about the dog.
May 12, 2021
3.5 Stars
Grade=B-
It was interesting and there were some truly heartbreaking moments in the individual journeys the characters took but the romance didn't shine through for me ergo the lower grade.
Grade=B-
It was interesting and there were some truly heartbreaking moments in the individual journeys the characters took but the romance didn't shine through for me ergo the lower grade.
November 18, 2021
How nice is it to read a romance where the characters slowly sort their stuff out while being honest with each other? I liked this a great deal, and a great setting.
May 7, 2021
Loved this one - smart, nerdy heroine and meaningful character growth for both. Also I learned a lot about telegraphs, which was fun.
April 21, 2021
I love this book so much. By chapter two of The Devil Comes Courting, I was introducing Captain Greyson Hunter to the world as my new book boyfriend. By the end of the book I was curled in a fleece blanket crying and so happy that Greyson and Amelia finally pulled themselves together enough to stop being idiots and fully commit to each other. Courtney Milan is magical.
Greyson is looking for someone called Silver Fox who he wants to employ to create a telegraphic code for Chinese characters. What he finds is Mrs. Amelia Smith, the adopted Chinese daughter of British missionaries and the widow of a missionary. Amelia feels like she belongs no where, too Chinese to be British and too British to be Chinese. When Greyson looks at her, he sees a person with a mind that can change the world.
The Devil Comes Courting is a slow burn that cover a few years. Greyson and Amelia are apart a lot, but Milan makes it work. They find a way to stay connected over miles and time. Letters play a big role in this book in many ways, for many characters. Which is appropriate because Greyson is building a transpacific telegraph system that will allow people to communicate more easily. Greyson begins the story believing in Amelia when she doesn’t know how to believe in herself, and Amelia comes to believe in Greyson in a way that he doesn’t believe in himself.
The Worth Saga continues to be about people coming to believe that they are worthy. A world broken by racism, colonialism, war, sexism, and homophobia won’t allow people to be themselves. Amelia has been shoved into an identity that does not fit her and for which she will never be accepted. Greyson struggles with survivor’s guilt. In this book, Amelia experiences the bulk of the racism and it’s facets are sharp and subtle. As a Black British American man, Greyson factors how racism will impact his reception into his decisions as well.
As always, the Author’s Note at the end is almost as engaging as the book itself.
There are general and specific content warnings on Courtney Milan’s website.
I received an advance reader copy from the author in exchange for an honest review.
Greyson is looking for someone called Silver Fox who he wants to employ to create a telegraphic code for Chinese characters. What he finds is Mrs. Amelia Smith, the adopted Chinese daughter of British missionaries and the widow of a missionary. Amelia feels like she belongs no where, too Chinese to be British and too British to be Chinese. When Greyson looks at her, he sees a person with a mind that can change the world.
The Devil Comes Courting is a slow burn that cover a few years. Greyson and Amelia are apart a lot, but Milan makes it work. They find a way to stay connected over miles and time. Letters play a big role in this book in many ways, for many characters. Which is appropriate because Greyson is building a transpacific telegraph system that will allow people to communicate more easily. Greyson begins the story believing in Amelia when she doesn’t know how to believe in herself, and Amelia comes to believe in Greyson in a way that he doesn’t believe in himself.
The Worth Saga continues to be about people coming to believe that they are worthy. A world broken by racism, colonialism, war, sexism, and homophobia won’t allow people to be themselves. Amelia has been shoved into an identity that does not fit her and for which she will never be accepted. Greyson struggles with survivor’s guilt. In this book, Amelia experiences the bulk of the racism and it’s facets are sharp and subtle. As a Black British American man, Greyson factors how racism will impact his reception into his decisions as well.
As always, the Author’s Note at the end is almost as engaging as the book itself.
There are general and specific content warnings on Courtney Milan’s website.
I received an advance reader copy from the author in exchange for an honest review.
April 26, 2021
4.5 stars rounded to 5. Is this a good book? Without question, yes. Is it a romance? That is debatable. Yes, there is a love story with an ultimately happy ending. But was that the point of the book? The Devil Comes Courting combines an unflinching progressive lens on a little-known historical era with an unapologetically optimistic outcome for our protagonists. Grayson and Amelia are intelligent, ambitious, flawed, courageous characters, and we were rooting for them to come out on top of their circumstances. Before they can meet each other halfway, though, they have to accept themselves fully.
We 100% recommend this book, but go into it knowing that it's not the kind of "I laughed the whole time except when I was crying!" romance you get with, for example, Milan's The Duke Who Didn't. This is more of an alternate history of the late 19th Century with a wonderful romance subplot.
27-Word Summaries:
Meg: Falling in love means not just meeting the right person, but being in the right place with yourself. Amelia & Grayson somehow meet all conditions with each other.
Laine: Telegraph writer... telegraph writer. Grayson has thrown himself into work to fulfill his dead brothers' dreams and Amelia is finding her identity as a transnational adoptee. Heavy.
This objective review is based on a complimentary copy of the novel.
We 100% recommend this book, but go into it knowing that it's not the kind of "I laughed the whole time except when I was crying!" romance you get with, for example, Milan's The Duke Who Didn't. This is more of an alternate history of the late 19th Century with a wonderful romance subplot.
27-Word Summaries:
Meg: Falling in love means not just meeting the right person, but being in the right place with yourself. Amelia & Grayson somehow meet all conditions with each other.
Laine: Telegraph writer... telegraph writer. Grayson has thrown himself into work to fulfill his dead brothers' dreams and Amelia is finding her identity as a transnational adoptee. Heavy.
This objective review is based on a complimentary copy of the novel.
July 10, 2024
Well, this was stunning. Set in 1870 China.
Grayson Hunter has been chasing his brothers' memories since they were killed in the American Civil War. (Only his youngest, Adrian, the hero of After the Wedding, is still alive.) He's playing out their legacies by running telegraph cable between China and San Francisco. Widowed Amelia Smith is brilliant and neurodivergent - never ask her to remember a name, but do ask her to invent a code to translate traditional Chinese characters to Morse code for an international telegraphic system. Adopted by missionaries at a young age, she's adrift as a Chinese woman raised to be British and never sure where she fits.
This book touches on love and family, as all the Worth books do, but the added layer of adoption and Amelia longing for her birth mother makes these themes keener. I love that in Milan's more recent writing, there are two central love stories- that of the couple, and that of each main character as they relate to their families.
The Devil Comes Courting has exquisitely timed humor, cutting through some of those thicker, harder themes. It's brilliant.
Grayson Hunter has been chasing his brothers' memories since they were killed in the American Civil War. (Only his youngest, Adrian, the hero of After the Wedding, is still alive.) He's playing out their legacies by running telegraph cable between China and San Francisco. Widowed Amelia Smith is brilliant and neurodivergent - never ask her to remember a name, but do ask her to invent a code to translate traditional Chinese characters to Morse code for an international telegraphic system. Adopted by missionaries at a young age, she's adrift as a Chinese woman raised to be British and never sure where she fits.
This book touches on love and family, as all the Worth books do, but the added layer of adoption and Amelia longing for her birth mother makes these themes keener. I love that in Milan's more recent writing, there are two central love stories- that of the couple, and that of each main character as they relate to their families.
The Devil Comes Courting has exquisitely timed humor, cutting through some of those thicker, harder themes. It's brilliant.
July 27, 2023
Powerful. And fascinating from beginning to end. Set against an epic saga of the laying of the first transpacific telegraph cable, the plot revolves around the wildly ambitious Captain Grayson Hunter and his acquisition of someone capable of devising telegraphic code for the Chinese language. The MOST interesting aspect of this novel-of-myriad-interesting-aspects is the complicated dynamics of family emotions, perceptions, expectations, and experiences, handled with such insight and care that it does overshadow the romance a bit. As for the love story, the connection between Grayson and Amelia was instantly and deeply felt, but evolved slowly over periods of long separation. Too many long periods of separation, in this reader’s opinion, but I feel churlish to say so considering this novel’s embarrassment of riches. I loved this book!
May 14, 2021
3.5 stars. I think this is really more historical fiction than it is historical romance. (You can tell by the low page count of scenes where Amelia and Gray are together.) I've seen other authors drift away from the genre into more general fiction and I wonder if Courtney Milan is going through this?
Also:
Also:
May 7, 2021
When you read Courtney Milan, be prepared to be blown away on many levels. I gobbled this book in about two days and I'm not sorry. Just giving myself more time for the re-read.
One of the most wonderful thing about Ms Milan is her story is layered, rich, filled with amazing details that teach you something new. This book introduced me to gutta percha, a tropical tree sap responsible for the Europeans to set up their telegraph lines and dominate the global commerce and war in the late 19th and 20th century. The latex served as telegraph cable insulator before polyethylene was discovered, and was one of the ways the European colonialists ravaged the Nusantara.
Now I need to read more history of my people which can make me just so angry.
This book deals with a plethora of ideas that I had expected it to be twice as long. We have a heroine with ADHD, dealing with life at the crossroads of culture (being a Chinese adopted by an English missionary living in China), whose brains and heart often led her into trouble. Her growth from the start of the book till the epilogue has been such a beautiful blossoming; everyone can flourish when given the right support and love. Her courage to seize life was sparked by rebellion, which allowed her to live her life entirely on her terms without relying on anyone to make her decisions. Simply remarkable.
The hero is a man obsessed with his mission and will stop at nothing to assuage his survivor's guilt. A Black man making his mark in global trade in the late 19th century may seem unlikely, but again, not impossible. I love how Ms Milan explored the possibilities of unsung stories that are often missed out by historians simply because the protagonist doesn't fit the usual white man mould and is instead a person of colour, or a woman, or someone who isn't heteronormative.
The concept of lies and courage was explored through three characters; the main protagonists and a side character linking the book to the Worth Saga. Everyone knows the fear of failure and disappointing others can lead us to lie, and when we are tangled up in our fabrications, not everyone has the guts to sever the trap with truth. How each character dealt with this in their progression in the book is just wonderful. I shan't spoil it.
I'm sorry if my review is wild and unwieldy, it's just that unpacking everything I adore about this book is going towards the realm of spoilers and I want you to enjoy it as thoroughly as I did.
Go read it. It's worth your time and money and more.
One of the most wonderful thing about Ms Milan is her story is layered, rich, filled with amazing details that teach you something new. This book introduced me to gutta percha, a tropical tree sap responsible for the Europeans to set up their telegraph lines and dominate the global commerce and war in the late 19th and 20th century. The latex served as telegraph cable insulator before polyethylene was discovered, and was one of the ways the European colonialists ravaged the Nusantara.
Now I need to read more history of my people which can make me just so angry.
This book deals with a plethora of ideas that I had expected it to be twice as long. We have a heroine with ADHD, dealing with life at the crossroads of culture (being a Chinese adopted by an English missionary living in China), whose brains and heart often led her into trouble. Her growth from the start of the book till the epilogue has been such a beautiful blossoming; everyone can flourish when given the right support and love. Her courage to seize life was sparked by rebellion, which allowed her to live her life entirely on her terms without relying on anyone to make her decisions. Simply remarkable.
The hero is a man obsessed with his mission and will stop at nothing to assuage his survivor's guilt. A Black man making his mark in global trade in the late 19th century may seem unlikely, but again, not impossible. I love how Ms Milan explored the possibilities of unsung stories that are often missed out by historians simply because the protagonist doesn't fit the usual white man mould and is instead a person of colour, or a woman, or someone who isn't heteronormative.
The concept of lies and courage was explored through three characters; the main protagonists and a side character linking the book to the Worth Saga. Everyone knows the fear of failure and disappointing others can lead us to lie, and when we are tangled up in our fabrications, not everyone has the guts to sever the trap with truth. How each character dealt with this in their progression in the book is just wonderful. I shan't spoil it.
I'm sorry if my review is wild and unwieldy, it's just that unpacking everything I adore about this book is going towards the realm of spoilers and I want you to enjoy it as thoroughly as I did.
Go read it. It's worth your time and money and more.
April 24, 2021
I think this may be the best book Courtney Milan has ever written- and that’s saying a lot! I don’t know when the last time was I’ve cried so much over a book- or rooted so hard and so equally for both the main characters. Fortunately, since it’s a romance, it all comes to a magnificent and fitting end and just deserts are had all around. Or at least as just as they can be in any world even moderately like ours. This is the sort of book that gives you hope for making the one we’re stuck in into something better.
June 7, 2021
Courtney Milan is one of my favorite authors. My all-time favorite is her Brothers Sinister series and I tend to compare all historical romances to those. Ms. Milan stories have become lighter, her characters more diverse. And I applaud having non-white protagonists. It is just that it makes everything more complicated and I kept begin distracted about a million issues. How are other people regarding the relationship? What kind of education did she have? What about him? How much racism did he encounter in China?... There are plenty of great moments - like when he said "I don't have to threaten you to put you under threat" - and there are also a lot of things smoothed out - like how they understood each other so well without talking much. This review didn't tell you much, did it?
July 8, 2021
This is Courtney Milan at her finest.
I often descend into pedantry when I talk about CM books. I don't know why, but the words come out. The words that are trying to come out of me now are a jumble of both wild and educated guesses about the Big Picture of the Worth Saga and how this book just has a vibe about it of finally choosing a direction. I don't want to go down that road, because I don't actually know what Milan's grand intentions are, but I can say that I do feel validated by her saying in her own author's note that this was the book that had been in the works the longest and that the previous books in the series were all meant to lead here.
So, honestly, this was a book that I enjoyed so much that I'm more comfortable living with how I feel about it in my head than trying to describe why in words. It's a can't miss if you're a fan of Milan's work.
I often descend into pedantry when I talk about CM books. I don't know why, but the words come out. The words that are trying to come out of me now are a jumble of both wild and educated guesses about the Big Picture of the Worth Saga and how this book just has a vibe about it of finally choosing a direction. I don't want to go down that road, because I don't actually know what Milan's grand intentions are, but I can say that I do feel validated by her saying in her own author's note that this was the book that had been in the works the longest and that the previous books in the series were all meant to lead here.
So, honestly, this was a book that I enjoyed so much that I'm more comfortable living with how I feel about it in my head than trying to describe why in words. It's a can't miss if you're a fan of Milan's work.
June 19, 2019
The book was released today but isn't available to purchase anywhere? Amazon or Google or B&N?
May 14, 2022
This book is so rich, I want to know so much more about telegraph history in China. The characters’ thoughts about happiness and bridges and connection… I always relish reading her books.
April 21, 2021
I have so much love for this book
It’s exquisitely painful in many respects
But oh so good
Favorite quotes:
Amelia did not consider herself a liar, but she was a pointed teller of insufficient truths.
They had now slotted him in place. Not British in their minds, no matter who his mother had been. But… British-adjacent. British enough to know the rules. British enough to converse with.
Grayson tried not to have real emotions at all, let alone in public.
It had not escaped Grayson’s notice that none of the ladies here had introduced themselves to him, nor did they seem likely to do so. They had not thanked him for the delivery. Perhaps they had not noticed that it had taken time and effort on his part. At one point in his life, he had harbored emotions about that sort of oversight. Now he refused to let such things bother him. He took all the frustration, all the rage, and siphoned it off into determination. They’d pay him back, all of them. They would pay it all back eventually.
It took some real inattention to detail, reality, and history to call either the Chinese or the varied nations that made up what Britain called India uncivilized, but then English propriety was that rare combination of inattention to everything that mattered coupled with a minute fascination with everything that didn’t. After all, they were accusing China of being uncivilized while residing in the territory of one of the oldest civilizations in the world.
when it came to valuing people other than themselves, colonialists were masters of a vast criminal conspiracy.
Grayson rolled his eyes. “Mrs. Smith, you do not strike me as the sort of person whom it would be difficult to like. It says absolutely nothing about anyone’s character that they have chosen to do so.”
“Your brother showed me some of your letters. I’ve seen your idea for a Chinese telegraphic code. I listened to you talk. I just saw you light up like a second sun. You can’t actually fool me into thinking you can’t do this. You can only fool yourself.”
“You are absolutely wasted here. It took me two minutes to realize that you are one of the brightest people I have ever met in my life. I want to hire you and set you loose on my problems, and you’re here wasting all that power of imagination determining whether you can endure a marriage to Mr. Flappert.”
“I’m clever enough to be suspicious. Someone I’ve only just met appears out of nowhere, offering me a chance to escape something I dread by being paid to do something I enjoy so much I have done it for amusement.” Her nose wrinkled. “‘When the devil comes courting…’”
He held up a hand. “Am I the devil here?”
“No. Of course not. I am. That’s the point of the aphorism. You make mistakes when you want things too much. You have to stop and ask yourself if it’s right, if it makes sense, or you’re only deluding yourself.”
Decide if you want to change the world…or let the world change you. What immense hubris. What fun, some small part of her mind whispered. She squashed that down.
“But what he wants is immaterial,” the captain went on. “What do you want?”
“You make it sound so easy. The wanting, I mean.”
“On the contrary. Wanting well is extraordinarily difficult.”
“You are a ship’s captain,” she said to him. “When you’re out in the middle of the ocean, do you ever worry about what lies beneath you?”
He took this wild change of subject with aplomb. “I lay submarine telegraphic cable. I worry about the ocean floor all the time.”
“I’m speaking less geographically and more…animalistically.”
He wrinkled his nose. “You mean plankton and such?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of…a megalodon.”
He stopped and turned to her. “A megalodon.”
“Yes,” she couldn’t stop herself from saying. “The massive sharks from the Jurassic period. The teeth they’ve found can be as much as six inches in length, and they believe—” She managed to bite back her words before her megalodonic enthusiasm overwhelmed the conversation. She could imagine her mother’s reproach. Nobody wants to know more megalodon facts, Amelia.
I don’t fit in much of anywhere. I’m not anyone’s first choice for anything. I’m not their second choice. I’m perhaps the…seventh, if they get around to choosing me at all.”
The way he was looking at her changed. She waved an annoyed hand at him. “For God’s sake. Don’t pity me. It is what it is. I’ve accepted it. But you see what I mean. There’s enough for me to contend with in these shallow waters. I can’t go hunting megalodons. Your entire proposition is preposterous.”
“It doesn’t make her not a good woman,” Amelia said. “But it does make her company very uncomfortable. She looks at me as if at any moment I might have an unaccountable outbreak of savagery.”
You should make friends with your megalodon. But she didn’t need more things to want. That was exactly the problem. She was hardly short on regular wants.
Leland says that he’s utterly ruthless, that he’s possessed of an incisive mind, but that…” How had Leland put it? “That he’s never done anything to anyone without their full and enthusiastic participation.”
Her mother bit her lip. “That’s extremely alarming.”
“Is it? It sounded reassuring to me.”
“You know,” her mother said, “if you take employment, you’ll never marry. Men won’t want that in a wife.”
Amelia turned to her mother and saw the grave expression on her face. As if she were speaking of the worst fate that might befall a woman. Amelia, however, had been married once. Not being tied to another Alden seemed like an unexpected bounty.
“In the next year and a half, I have to lay the last two segments of the transpacific cable—four thousand miles. I have to establish telegraphy on the Chinese mainland. I need a code that will convince the Taotai of Shanghai that this is not just some Western devilry. I have to be rational or I’ll never get this done.”
“I hear you on the difficulty of the work.” Zed met his eyes. “The part I have difficulty with is that you think your plan is rational.”
She thought of the five years of her marriage—of trying and trying to make her husband happy. She had succeeded. But after the second year of her marriage, she’d realized that his marital bliss did not make hers any more likely. She’d begun to resent his felicity, unaccompanied as it was by a similar feeling on her own part.
When you need someone to have a will of her own, you can’t just bend her to yours.”
When the devil comes courting, he offers you what you want. That aphorism seemed to eat up all the light inside her. Nothing can change, her mother had told her. Nothing can change except you, so change. Change more. Change harder.
Amelia was tired of changing to make other people happy. She was tired of feeling like she was worth so little that she should be grateful that a woman wanted to hire her as a scarcely glorified housekeeper to provide her husband with all the comforts of home, sexual intercourse included. She was vibrating with the need to elude the snare her life had made for her, vibrating so hard she feared she’d run straight into folly.
I want more. It thrummed through her system, impossible to ignore. I want more. Something had to change. Something had to.
Amelia went to her wardrobe and looked inside. Dear God, what did makers of telegraphic code even wear? She suspected the answer was trousers, since they were likely all men. That seemed rather risqué, even for her current mood.
It had felt to her like a horrible breach of manners to show up in someone else’s country and to tell them they were doing everything wrong, and as a consequence, God intended for them all to go to hell.
She shook her head emphatically. “It will do me no good to hold out real hope. I can scarcely manage the false variety.”
“Mrs. Smith.” Captain Hunter looked her directly in the eyes. “Do you remember what I told you on board the Celerity?”
“Um.” There had been so many things. “Which thing?”
“I have to let you loose on the world.”
She wasn’t sure if the smile he gave her was kind or cruel.
“That means you’re going to have to let yourself loose as well.”
He gave her a little shrug. “Do you want me to offer false platitudes?”
She looked up, glaring. “Well now I don’t! You aren’t supposed to admit your platitudes are false before offering them! It completely ruins the effect.”
That was what made it so hard. She did want this. She wanted to be the person who did it, because if she did… If she did, she would finally have someplace where she belonged, even if she’d had to carve it out herself at the intersection of China and the West. She felt tears prick against her eyelids.
His hands clenched around his cup. “You have his intelligence. His enthusiasm. I forgot you didn’t have his experience. Noah would have known he could succeed.”
Amelia felt a pit of uncertainty in her stomach. “And I don’t.”
“You don’t know it yet,” he said. “You’ll have to learn by doing.”
She made a face. “You don’t learn success. You either succeed or you don’t.”
He finally looked up at her. “No,” he said slowly. “Take it from me. You learn. And if someone has taught you not to succeed, you learn that too. You’ll learn.”
“How?”
He looked at her across the table. “You’ll learn because there’s something you want more than your fear.”
You think that my caring about your feelings is extraordinary, when it is a bare minimum. Don’t sell yourself cheaply, Amelia. Not even to me.”
my next-eldest sister. The one who ran away.”
Amelia tilted her head. It was the first non-treason-related thing she’d heard about his family.
“She ran away?”
Benedict made an equivocal noise. “Technically, she took the Dowager Marchioness with her, so it was more like… leaving England in the middle of the night without permission while still accompanied by a chaperone?
Since everyone in Britain but his family hated him, it had been absolutely no hardship at all to volunteer to look for his sister. So long as he didn’t find her, he didn’t have to say no himself. No, I don’t want to go to university. No, I don’t want to marry one of these fine English maidens. No, I don’t want to petition to take my father’s title. It was far simpler to search fruitlessly for Theresa.
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Theresa had groused at him as she’d come up beside him. “This world is not large enough for the two of us!”
From someone else, those words would have been a threat. From her, it had been the simple truth. They’d conducted a hasty, hushed meeting on the street outside the hotel and arranged a system of communication so they could most efficaciously avoid finding one another in the future.
Shortly after that, Amelia got a note in the courier pile again.
32.
If you get this, we’ve used the system you and Lightfoot developed for a week without incident. Excellent work. You should be proud of yourself.
Proud of herself. It seemed such an odd concept, to be proud of herself. And yet… There it was. A flicker of happiness in her chest.
Amelia grinned, hugged the page to her chest, and then went back to work.
Captain Hunter’s words before he took her to the tea shop had stayed with her, rankling in her soul. Don’t tell me it’s fine if it isn’t fine.
She had thought herself generally truthful up until that point. But once he had said those words, she’d suddenly become aware of all the ways in which she lied.
“I’m fine” was only the start. She had started a list of the lies she had told her mother, and they had been surprisingly extensive. “No, it doesn’t bother me if I can’t get a dog.” “Of course it’s no problem.” “I’m willing to marry again.” “I’d love to meet Mrs. Flappert.”
It had been a shock to her sensibilities to discover that she was not only untruthful, she was a consummate, inveterate liar.
Captain Hunter. I never did apologize to you for lying.
I said it was fine and it wasn’t. My mother told me to always tell the truth, and it pains me to realize I have fallen short. I have just realized that I was told to tell the truth, but when I did, my truth was not wanted. It has left my mind somewhat muddled.
I am working to correct this flaw.
Amelia Smith.
Benedict had been years out of England now and had spent most of that time with Captain Hunter. His ability to judge the deference owed to someone of a different social station had once been knife sharp. That sense had now dulled to a useless blob of barely remembered facts. He was no longer sure who he was supposed to treat as his better and who he was supposed to assume was beneath him. The end result was that he made it all up as he went along and inevitably made everyone British despise him a little.
“I understand that sometimes it is necessary to lie and claim everything is well. I told myself I wasn’t doing it, but I was. But if you never tell anyone you’re not fine, who will take care of you?”
God. The sheer density of the load on him felt unbearable. Take care of him? The concept felt impossible.
Take care of him? Not Noah, his sweet younger brother. Not Harry, his longtime confidante. Not John. He thought of the flash of resentment in his mother’s eyes, of the five days he’d spent with his family, of her saying, I’m so glad you’ve taken a week from your busy schedule to see your family. At least this way, with his time eked out to them five days at a time, she could forget.
Forget that he wasn’t the bright one, wasn’t the one who would bring her babies. She was always going to resent him just a little for being the one who survived, and he couldn’t blame her. He couldn’t blame any of them.
How could he ask for anyone to take care of him, when he hadn’t been able to care for his younger brothers? Who would take care of him?
The answer, desolate and lonely, was obvious. Nobody. Not even himself. And he couldn’t think that—he couldn’t let himself wallow in any of the feelings that arose with that admission. Feelings were the enemy.
He let out a long sigh. “God. I’m so dreadfully sorry.”
Her eyes narrowed as she contemplated him. Then she shook her head. “Put your apology in a fire pit and burn it to ash.”
“Don’t think I have not noticed. There was an apology and there were kisses, but you haven’t answered my question. Who is taking care of you?”
His breath punched out. He didn’t have the strength to resist any longer.
“Nobody,” he confessed.
It had been months since he’d teased her about her megalodons. Now she was doing it back to him. He felt like a pane of glass, liable to shatter at any moment. His throat seemed full of sand.
“Nobody,” he repeated through the gravel that seemed to clog his speech. “Everybody who did was killed.”
He could hear the yearning in his words.
“I’m the only one left, and dammit, what do I need with something so paltry as care when I was so selfish as to survive?”
“Mrs. Smith.” He was choking on his want now. He had to—he didn’t know—shove it back. Push it away. Bury it beneath the ocean waves before it ate him whole.
It’s exquisitely painful in many respects
But oh so good
Favorite quotes:
Amelia did not consider herself a liar, but she was a pointed teller of insufficient truths.
They had now slotted him in place. Not British in their minds, no matter who his mother had been. But… British-adjacent. British enough to know the rules. British enough to converse with.
Grayson tried not to have real emotions at all, let alone in public.
It had not escaped Grayson’s notice that none of the ladies here had introduced themselves to him, nor did they seem likely to do so. They had not thanked him for the delivery. Perhaps they had not noticed that it had taken time and effort on his part. At one point in his life, he had harbored emotions about that sort of oversight. Now he refused to let such things bother him. He took all the frustration, all the rage, and siphoned it off into determination. They’d pay him back, all of them. They would pay it all back eventually.
It took some real inattention to detail, reality, and history to call either the Chinese or the varied nations that made up what Britain called India uncivilized, but then English propriety was that rare combination of inattention to everything that mattered coupled with a minute fascination with everything that didn’t. After all, they were accusing China of being uncivilized while residing in the territory of one of the oldest civilizations in the world.
when it came to valuing people other than themselves, colonialists were masters of a vast criminal conspiracy.
Grayson rolled his eyes. “Mrs. Smith, you do not strike me as the sort of person whom it would be difficult to like. It says absolutely nothing about anyone’s character that they have chosen to do so.”
“Your brother showed me some of your letters. I’ve seen your idea for a Chinese telegraphic code. I listened to you talk. I just saw you light up like a second sun. You can’t actually fool me into thinking you can’t do this. You can only fool yourself.”
“You are absolutely wasted here. It took me two minutes to realize that you are one of the brightest people I have ever met in my life. I want to hire you and set you loose on my problems, and you’re here wasting all that power of imagination determining whether you can endure a marriage to Mr. Flappert.”
“I’m clever enough to be suspicious. Someone I’ve only just met appears out of nowhere, offering me a chance to escape something I dread by being paid to do something I enjoy so much I have done it for amusement.” Her nose wrinkled. “‘When the devil comes courting…’”
He held up a hand. “Am I the devil here?”
“No. Of course not. I am. That’s the point of the aphorism. You make mistakes when you want things too much. You have to stop and ask yourself if it’s right, if it makes sense, or you’re only deluding yourself.”
Decide if you want to change the world…or let the world change you. What immense hubris. What fun, some small part of her mind whispered. She squashed that down.
“But what he wants is immaterial,” the captain went on. “What do you want?”
“You make it sound so easy. The wanting, I mean.”
“On the contrary. Wanting well is extraordinarily difficult.”
“You are a ship’s captain,” she said to him. “When you’re out in the middle of the ocean, do you ever worry about what lies beneath you?”
He took this wild change of subject with aplomb. “I lay submarine telegraphic cable. I worry about the ocean floor all the time.”
“I’m speaking less geographically and more…animalistically.”
He wrinkled his nose. “You mean plankton and such?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of…a megalodon.”
He stopped and turned to her. “A megalodon.”
“Yes,” she couldn’t stop herself from saying. “The massive sharks from the Jurassic period. The teeth they’ve found can be as much as six inches in length, and they believe—” She managed to bite back her words before her megalodonic enthusiasm overwhelmed the conversation. She could imagine her mother’s reproach. Nobody wants to know more megalodon facts, Amelia.
I don’t fit in much of anywhere. I’m not anyone’s first choice for anything. I’m not their second choice. I’m perhaps the…seventh, if they get around to choosing me at all.”
The way he was looking at her changed. She waved an annoyed hand at him. “For God’s sake. Don’t pity me. It is what it is. I’ve accepted it. But you see what I mean. There’s enough for me to contend with in these shallow waters. I can’t go hunting megalodons. Your entire proposition is preposterous.”
“It doesn’t make her not a good woman,” Amelia said. “But it does make her company very uncomfortable. She looks at me as if at any moment I might have an unaccountable outbreak of savagery.”
You should make friends with your megalodon. But she didn’t need more things to want. That was exactly the problem. She was hardly short on regular wants.
Leland says that he’s utterly ruthless, that he’s possessed of an incisive mind, but that…” How had Leland put it? “That he’s never done anything to anyone without their full and enthusiastic participation.”
Her mother bit her lip. “That’s extremely alarming.”
“Is it? It sounded reassuring to me.”
“You know,” her mother said, “if you take employment, you’ll never marry. Men won’t want that in a wife.”
Amelia turned to her mother and saw the grave expression on her face. As if she were speaking of the worst fate that might befall a woman. Amelia, however, had been married once. Not being tied to another Alden seemed like an unexpected bounty.
“In the next year and a half, I have to lay the last two segments of the transpacific cable—four thousand miles. I have to establish telegraphy on the Chinese mainland. I need a code that will convince the Taotai of Shanghai that this is not just some Western devilry. I have to be rational or I’ll never get this done.”
“I hear you on the difficulty of the work.” Zed met his eyes. “The part I have difficulty with is that you think your plan is rational.”
She thought of the five years of her marriage—of trying and trying to make her husband happy. She had succeeded. But after the second year of her marriage, she’d realized that his marital bliss did not make hers any more likely. She’d begun to resent his felicity, unaccompanied as it was by a similar feeling on her own part.
When you need someone to have a will of her own, you can’t just bend her to yours.”
When the devil comes courting, he offers you what you want. That aphorism seemed to eat up all the light inside her. Nothing can change, her mother had told her. Nothing can change except you, so change. Change more. Change harder.
Amelia was tired of changing to make other people happy. She was tired of feeling like she was worth so little that she should be grateful that a woman wanted to hire her as a scarcely glorified housekeeper to provide her husband with all the comforts of home, sexual intercourse included. She was vibrating with the need to elude the snare her life had made for her, vibrating so hard she feared she’d run straight into folly.
I want more. It thrummed through her system, impossible to ignore. I want more. Something had to change. Something had to.
Amelia went to her wardrobe and looked inside. Dear God, what did makers of telegraphic code even wear? She suspected the answer was trousers, since they were likely all men. That seemed rather risqué, even for her current mood.
It had felt to her like a horrible breach of manners to show up in someone else’s country and to tell them they were doing everything wrong, and as a consequence, God intended for them all to go to hell.
She shook her head emphatically. “It will do me no good to hold out real hope. I can scarcely manage the false variety.”
“Mrs. Smith.” Captain Hunter looked her directly in the eyes. “Do you remember what I told you on board the Celerity?”
“Um.” There had been so many things. “Which thing?”
“I have to let you loose on the world.”
She wasn’t sure if the smile he gave her was kind or cruel.
“That means you’re going to have to let yourself loose as well.”
He gave her a little shrug. “Do you want me to offer false platitudes?”
She looked up, glaring. “Well now I don’t! You aren’t supposed to admit your platitudes are false before offering them! It completely ruins the effect.”
That was what made it so hard. She did want this. She wanted to be the person who did it, because if she did… If she did, she would finally have someplace where she belonged, even if she’d had to carve it out herself at the intersection of China and the West. She felt tears prick against her eyelids.
His hands clenched around his cup. “You have his intelligence. His enthusiasm. I forgot you didn’t have his experience. Noah would have known he could succeed.”
Amelia felt a pit of uncertainty in her stomach. “And I don’t.”
“You don’t know it yet,” he said. “You’ll have to learn by doing.”
She made a face. “You don’t learn success. You either succeed or you don’t.”
He finally looked up at her. “No,” he said slowly. “Take it from me. You learn. And if someone has taught you not to succeed, you learn that too. You’ll learn.”
“How?”
He looked at her across the table. “You’ll learn because there’s something you want more than your fear.”
You think that my caring about your feelings is extraordinary, when it is a bare minimum. Don’t sell yourself cheaply, Amelia. Not even to me.”
my next-eldest sister. The one who ran away.”
Amelia tilted her head. It was the first non-treason-related thing she’d heard about his family.
“She ran away?”
Benedict made an equivocal noise. “Technically, she took the Dowager Marchioness with her, so it was more like… leaving England in the middle of the night without permission while still accompanied by a chaperone?
Since everyone in Britain but his family hated him, it had been absolutely no hardship at all to volunteer to look for his sister. So long as he didn’t find her, he didn’t have to say no himself. No, I don’t want to go to university. No, I don’t want to marry one of these fine English maidens. No, I don’t want to petition to take my father’s title. It was far simpler to search fruitlessly for Theresa.
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Theresa had groused at him as she’d come up beside him. “This world is not large enough for the two of us!”
From someone else, those words would have been a threat. From her, it had been the simple truth. They’d conducted a hasty, hushed meeting on the street outside the hotel and arranged a system of communication so they could most efficaciously avoid finding one another in the future.
Shortly after that, Amelia got a note in the courier pile again.
32.
If you get this, we’ve used the system you and Lightfoot developed for a week without incident. Excellent work. You should be proud of yourself.
Proud of herself. It seemed such an odd concept, to be proud of herself. And yet… There it was. A flicker of happiness in her chest.
Amelia grinned, hugged the page to her chest, and then went back to work.
Captain Hunter’s words before he took her to the tea shop had stayed with her, rankling in her soul. Don’t tell me it’s fine if it isn’t fine.
She had thought herself generally truthful up until that point. But once he had said those words, she’d suddenly become aware of all the ways in which she lied.
“I’m fine” was only the start. She had started a list of the lies she had told her mother, and they had been surprisingly extensive. “No, it doesn’t bother me if I can’t get a dog.” “Of course it’s no problem.” “I’m willing to marry again.” “I’d love to meet Mrs. Flappert.”
It had been a shock to her sensibilities to discover that she was not only untruthful, she was a consummate, inveterate liar.
Captain Hunter. I never did apologize to you for lying.
I said it was fine and it wasn’t. My mother told me to always tell the truth, and it pains me to realize I have fallen short. I have just realized that I was told to tell the truth, but when I did, my truth was not wanted. It has left my mind somewhat muddled.
I am working to correct this flaw.
Amelia Smith.
Benedict had been years out of England now and had spent most of that time with Captain Hunter. His ability to judge the deference owed to someone of a different social station had once been knife sharp. That sense had now dulled to a useless blob of barely remembered facts. He was no longer sure who he was supposed to treat as his better and who he was supposed to assume was beneath him. The end result was that he made it all up as he went along and inevitably made everyone British despise him a little.
“I understand that sometimes it is necessary to lie and claim everything is well. I told myself I wasn’t doing it, but I was. But if you never tell anyone you’re not fine, who will take care of you?”
God. The sheer density of the load on him felt unbearable. Take care of him? The concept felt impossible.
Take care of him? Not Noah, his sweet younger brother. Not Harry, his longtime confidante. Not John. He thought of the flash of resentment in his mother’s eyes, of the five days he’d spent with his family, of her saying, I’m so glad you’ve taken a week from your busy schedule to see your family. At least this way, with his time eked out to them five days at a time, she could forget.
Forget that he wasn’t the bright one, wasn’t the one who would bring her babies. She was always going to resent him just a little for being the one who survived, and he couldn’t blame her. He couldn’t blame any of them.
How could he ask for anyone to take care of him, when he hadn’t been able to care for his younger brothers? Who would take care of him?
The answer, desolate and lonely, was obvious. Nobody. Not even himself. And he couldn’t think that—he couldn’t let himself wallow in any of the feelings that arose with that admission. Feelings were the enemy.
He let out a long sigh. “God. I’m so dreadfully sorry.”
Her eyes narrowed as she contemplated him. Then she shook her head. “Put your apology in a fire pit and burn it to ash.”
“Don’t think I have not noticed. There was an apology and there were kisses, but you haven’t answered my question. Who is taking care of you?”
His breath punched out. He didn’t have the strength to resist any longer.
“Nobody,” he confessed.
It had been months since he’d teased her about her megalodons. Now she was doing it back to him. He felt like a pane of glass, liable to shatter at any moment. His throat seemed full of sand.
“Nobody,” he repeated through the gravel that seemed to clog his speech. “Everybody who did was killed.”
He could hear the yearning in his words.
“I’m the only one left, and dammit, what do I need with something so paltry as care when I was so selfish as to survive?”
“Mrs. Smith.” He was choking on his want now. He had to—he didn’t know—shove it back. Push it away. Bury it beneath the ocean waves before it ate him whole.
April 18, 2021
I received an ARC from the author and am voluntarily posting a review. All opinions are my own.
The Devil Comes Courting is the long-awaited third installment in the Worth Saga, and it’s absolutely worth it. After two uneven predecessors, this book is utterly enjoyable and almost as much a return to form as last year’s “surprise” release, The Duke Who Didn’t.
And part of that could be because the book had such a long gestation period, inspired by an idea early in Milan’s career and serving as the primary structural point for the Worth Saga, as she discusses in her author’s note, resulting in this one being the strongest of the series thus far.
And as is typical of her work, Milan looks to history, taking poetic license in believable ways to create a narrative that conveys important issues. Amelia was taken from her mother by English missionaries as a child. I loved how it explores the impact it had on her, especially as she finds her way back to her mother.
It was also great to see Grayson as a hero, given we’ve already met his brother and uncle in prior stories. While he didn’t win me over as much as a character, I was intrigued by his work with the telegraphic network, and really enjoyed the development of his romance with Amelia.
This is another winner from Courtney Milan, and I’m glad it’s finally coming out into the world, after such a long wait. Courtney Milan devotees will be satisfied (and left begging for more, especially as there’s a teaser for The Return of the Scoundrel and Wedgeford Trials #2!), and new fans who love a well-researched historical romance will likely be just as delighted.
The Devil Comes Courting is the long-awaited third installment in the Worth Saga, and it’s absolutely worth it. After two uneven predecessors, this book is utterly enjoyable and almost as much a return to form as last year’s “surprise” release, The Duke Who Didn’t.
And part of that could be because the book had such a long gestation period, inspired by an idea early in Milan’s career and serving as the primary structural point for the Worth Saga, as she discusses in her author’s note, resulting in this one being the strongest of the series thus far.
And as is typical of her work, Milan looks to history, taking poetic license in believable ways to create a narrative that conveys important issues. Amelia was taken from her mother by English missionaries as a child. I loved how it explores the impact it had on her, especially as she finds her way back to her mother.
It was also great to see Grayson as a hero, given we’ve already met his brother and uncle in prior stories. While he didn’t win me over as much as a character, I was intrigued by his work with the telegraphic network, and really enjoyed the development of his romance with Amelia.
This is another winner from Courtney Milan, and I’m glad it’s finally coming out into the world, after such a long wait. Courtney Milan devotees will be satisfied (and left begging for more, especially as there’s a teaser for The Return of the Scoundrel and Wedgeford Trials #2!), and new fans who love a well-researched historical romance will likely be just as delighted.
Read
April 18, 2021A top-tier book from a top-tier author. Telegraphy! An alternate history of transpacific undersea cables! Megalodons, literally and metaphorically! Envelopes! A puppy! How we construct happiness from who we are and where we've been! And those usual Milan staples: a dedication that makes me tear up before we even get to the actual story, and so many lines that I want to write down and remember and believe in for myself.
Big picture stuff: this is a character driven narrative, thoughtful and care-taking in its world-building and its character-building, lacking in unnecessary conflict. It deals explicitly and directly with racism, and it does so with those previously mentioned values of thoughtfulness and care. The story starts slow, and the protagonists do spend portions of the book physically separated from each other, which I know might frustrate some readers, but everything about those elements (the depth of internality, the plot specifics and the emotional spaces created by the protagonists' distance) worked for me.
This can totally be read as a standalone. (I didn't enjoy the first book or the first novella in this series to read them beyond the first couple of chapters; I enjoyed the second book and two most recent novellas, but enjoyment of this novel does not rely in any way on having read them. Any important information is conveyed, and previous protagonists appear only briefly.)
FTC Disclosure: I received an advance review copy of this book.
Big picture stuff: this is a character driven narrative, thoughtful and care-taking in its world-building and its character-building, lacking in unnecessary conflict. It deals explicitly and directly with racism, and it does so with those previously mentioned values of thoughtfulness and care. The story starts slow, and the protagonists do spend portions of the book physically separated from each other, which I know might frustrate some readers, but everything about those elements (the depth of internality, the plot specifics and the emotional spaces created by the protagonists' distance) worked for me.
This can totally be read as a standalone. (I didn't enjoy the first book or the first novella in this series to read them beyond the first couple of chapters; I enjoyed the second book and two most recent novellas, but enjoyment of this novel does not rely in any way on having read them. Any important information is conveyed, and previous protagonists appear only briefly.)
FTC Disclosure: I received an advance review copy of this book.
December 10, 2024
"When the devil comes courting, he offers you what you want."
I love Milan's depiction of diverse characters. She always has queerness, neurodivergence, and race respectfully treated in her novels. And this is a particular strength of TDCC, in which brilliantly intelligent Amelia - who can't remember names - is adopted by and widowed by white missionaries in China before our story even begins. When she meets Grayson, she encounters a Black American man who doesn't hold with the obfuscating of her race, language and culture. Also he wants someone to make it possible to transmit Chinese characters via telegraph.
The technical nerdy side of this was soooooo interesting...but the story felt flat in a lot of other places for me. I didn't care if Amelia and Grayson hooked up; I would have been happy if they had been life-long best friends. I think the germ of something brilliant was here, and for me it just got lost in execution. I miss the witty dialogue of the first Milan book I read: Once Upon a Marquess. I'd love to see that kind of wit come through to serve what is a highly emotional and poignant story.
I love Milan's depiction of diverse characters. She always has queerness, neurodivergence, and race respectfully treated in her novels. And this is a particular strength of TDCC, in which brilliantly intelligent Amelia - who can't remember names - is adopted by and widowed by white missionaries in China before our story even begins. When she meets Grayson, she encounters a Black American man who doesn't hold with the obfuscating of her race, language and culture. Also he wants someone to make it possible to transmit Chinese characters via telegraph.
The technical nerdy side of this was soooooo interesting...but the story felt flat in a lot of other places for me. I didn't care if Amelia and Grayson hooked up; I would have been happy if they had been life-long best friends. I think the germ of something brilliant was here, and for me it just got lost in execution. I miss the witty dialogue of the first Milan book I read: Once Upon a Marquess. I'd love to see that kind of wit come through to serve what is a highly emotional and poignant story.
April 7, 2024
Recommendation from Gretchen McCulloch--she said this can be put in conversation with Babel, I read. She was right! The cover and title (and genre tbh) were super misleading--yes it's a book for whores, but the subject matter being dealt with goes way beyond that. Criticism of colonialism and the missionaries who perpetrate it. Exploration of racism in numerous contexts, both through the main characters' backgrounds and linguistic racism (roll the Nebrija quote). Sexism. Grief. Family. Religion. Homophobia. Courtney was cooking! Just looked up her Wikipedia page and she seems like an icon, I will be stanning.
Really my points off are because Amelia was painfully, often unbearably, quirky (like fr it hurt), and I think the book took a beat to find its footing. Again, maybe this was because I didn't really know what to expect--linguist comparing this to Babel vs. cover+title+genre. But I think the first few chapters were really not in line with the rest of the book, in tone and content--felt like a generic (and bad) book for whores (Byronic hero, whisking away quirky timid damsel in distress) before this pulling a real bait and switch to being a really good book. And looking back I see how the characters needed that start for their growth, etc etc etc, I think if I reread knowing what I know now I would give it more grace, but it could've been executed better idk.
TLDR: a hit.
Really my points off are because Amelia was painfully, often unbearably, quirky (like fr it hurt), and I think the book took a beat to find its footing. Again, maybe this was because I didn't really know what to expect--linguist comparing this to Babel vs. cover+title+genre. But I think the first few chapters were really not in line with the rest of the book, in tone and content--felt like a generic (and bad) book for whores (Byronic hero, whisking away quirky timid damsel in distress) before this pulling a real bait and switch to being a really good book. And looking back I see how the characters needed that start for their growth, etc etc etc, I think if I reread knowing what I know now I would give it more grace, but it could've been executed better idk.
TLDR: a hit.
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