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A review by elusivity
An Assassin's Guide to Love and Treason by Virginia Boecker
3.0
This one took forever to finish. What to say....
The setting-up is interesting: Teenaged spy/main dude concocts a plan to draw out Catholics wanting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. Shakespeare and his company are drafted to enact a new play to be played in private audience with the Queen, in hopes some assassins would try to mix in among the players to do the deed. Lo, main chick is precisely that assassin, having disguised herself as a young man who is a decent player besides.
The plot was going swimmingly, until for no reason the chick suddenly falls super in love with main dude. And main dude, harboring a long-gone-but-never-forgotten gay love in his breast, reciprocates interest with what he thought was another boy. When her real gender came to the fore, he throws her out in a devastating way... And then, some short chapters later, having thought it over in the space of a paragraph--while revealing in passing that hey, he'd always been attracted to girls despite all his true loves always having been men--and decided he can be all up into her after all. Nothing wrong with being bi, but I can't help feeling this switched arise from no origin other than the plot calls for a happy ending.
And of course, all's well in the end.. And the play is renamed TWELFTH NIGHT, ta-dah!
I want to rate this 2.5 STARS for the cringy insta-love, but really, it is well-written, and the setting is unusual. So 3 STARS it shall be.
The setting-up is interesting: Teenaged spy/main dude concocts a plan to draw out Catholics wanting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. Shakespeare and his company are drafted to enact a new play to be played in private audience with the Queen, in hopes some assassins would try to mix in among the players to do the deed. Lo, main chick is precisely that assassin, having disguised herself as a young man who is a decent player besides.
The plot was going swimmingly, until for no reason the chick suddenly falls super in love with main dude. And main dude, harboring a long-gone-but-never-forgotten gay love in his breast, reciprocates interest with what he thought was another boy. When her real gender came to the fore, he throws her out in a devastating way... And then, some short chapters later, having thought it over in the space of a paragraph--while revealing in passing that hey, he'd always been attracted to girls despite all his true loves always having been men--and decided he can be all up into her after all. Nothing wrong with being bi, but I can't help feeling this switched arise from no origin other than the plot calls for a happy ending.
And of course, all's well in the end.
Spoiler
When it comes to the point of assassination, she feels conflicted and also knows it is a trap. Instead, her religious-zealot groom comes rushing out, having been trained secretly because the plotters wanted to hedge their bet. Main character prevents him from completing that goal, and dude gets accidentally killed on top of it all. Poor dude, what a purposeless life. Main dude warns the one guy he set-up to be the spy so that he runs away to France, and same for main chick. He himself gets nabbed, thrown into jail, but is amazingly rescued by his handler. He meets up with main chick in France, with some huge amount of money, and the world is their oyster.I want to rate this 2.5 STARS for the cringy insta-love, but really, it is well-written, and the setting is unusual. So 3 STARS it shall be.