A review by klettie
Ambush or Adore by Gail Carriger
4.0
I love Gail Carriger, and I love her stories there just to sate us fans. Soulless was one of the fist books I read when I started back into reading. I proceeded to read everything set in the world of the Parasol Protectorate. Carriger writes delightfully. Her works perfectly knit together found family, romance, and humor in a visually delightful and creative world.
Ambush or Adore finishes out her Delightfully Deadly novellas, which follow the main characters in the Finishing School series to their romantic ends. While most of the leading men in the other novels are newly met, here we get to see Agatha and Pillover’s story. And because we know both of our leads, this story is all the sweeter.
My thoughts:
1) Carriger deftly weaves a novella that spans decades while maintaining its sense of urgency. I was impressed — the other Delightfully Deadly books were all situated in moments in time, and I did not expect Carriger to deviate from that formula. The deviation elevates this story beautifully. We see how friendship transforms to love over years, the forwards and backwards movement of a relationship over time, and yet we can feel the thread of our leads’ love through the whole thing, and the dissonance — that they are not together — is maintained and pulls us along.
2) The fact that Pillover and Agatha’s relationship doesn’t look like most doesn’t mean it is any less, and I loved Carriger for writing this story. As someone who has for a long time had a relationship that doesn’t look normal to people outside (very long distance), I love Carriger for validating the love and the health of relationships that look different. There is a moment when Agatha and Pillover, who spend most of their time apart, have a conversation about why Pillover never seems surprised when Agatha randomly shows up after months away. Agatha asks him why he’s never surprised when she shows up. He says: “Because I always expect you to be there…It’s the absence that I find surprising.” And I thought: yes, that is exactly it.
3) There is a commentary here about what it means to sacrifice ambition for love, and it’s light but pointed. Neither Agatha nor Pillover sacrifices ambition for love — and at its core this decision is not a negative reflection on their mutual respect and love, but rather of how well they know themselves. These characters are adults. They know what they want and they adjust their lives just so in order to maximize the parts of themselves and their lives that are in alignment. Per Pillover, it would not have been romantic for Agatha to give up her work for him — she would not have been happy. Because she knows this, she doesn’t consider it an option.
4) It was a delight to see a different side of Lord Akeldama. I didn’t love this Lord Akeldama — unsurprisingly, because here he was all business. He was not the adoptive father figure we came to know and love in the rest of the books. Here he was a scary vampire. In the other books we knew this side of him must exist, because you don’t get to be powerful as he is without being at least a little scary.
5) In the very end when Agatha agrees to stay, Pillover’s tears and relief — and Carriger’s explanation for them — are for all the right reasons. Agatha’s refusal to see herself as lovable, her eternal commitment to this slog of a career because she can’t imagine anything better even as she is being physically brutalized in the field, is ultimately a rejection of Pillover. When Agatha decides to stay, she is communicating to Pillover that he was not wrong to love her, not wrong to stay committed over so many years — even as people repeatedly told him to let her go.
I read this book slowly, truly relished it over the course of hours, read each word to savor it. Don’t start here. Start with literally every other Parasol Protectorate book that exists.
But once you get here, know that this lovely lovely end will be waiting for you.
Ambush or Adore finishes out her Delightfully Deadly novellas, which follow the main characters in the Finishing School series to their romantic ends. While most of the leading men in the other novels are newly met, here we get to see Agatha and Pillover’s story. And because we know both of our leads, this story is all the sweeter.
My thoughts:
1) Carriger deftly weaves a novella that spans decades while maintaining its sense of urgency. I was impressed — the other Delightfully Deadly books were all situated in moments in time, and I did not expect Carriger to deviate from that formula. The deviation elevates this story beautifully. We see how friendship transforms to love over years, the forwards and backwards movement of a relationship over time, and yet we can feel the thread of our leads’ love through the whole thing, and the dissonance — that they are not together — is maintained and pulls us along.
2) The fact that Pillover and Agatha’s relationship doesn’t look like most doesn’t mean it is any less, and I loved Carriger for writing this story. As someone who has for a long time had a relationship that doesn’t look normal to people outside (very long distance), I love Carriger for validating the love and the health of relationships that look different. There is a moment when Agatha and Pillover, who spend most of their time apart, have a conversation about why Pillover never seems surprised when Agatha randomly shows up after months away. Agatha asks him why he’s never surprised when she shows up. He says: “Because I always expect you to be there…It’s the absence that I find surprising.” And I thought: yes, that is exactly it.
3) There is a commentary here about what it means to sacrifice ambition for love, and it’s light but pointed. Neither Agatha nor Pillover sacrifices ambition for love — and at its core this decision is not a negative reflection on their mutual respect and love, but rather of how well they know themselves. These characters are adults. They know what they want and they adjust their lives just so in order to maximize the parts of themselves and their lives that are in alignment. Per Pillover, it would not have been romantic for Agatha to give up her work for him — she would not have been happy. Because she knows this, she doesn’t consider it an option.
4) It was a delight to see a different side of Lord Akeldama. I didn’t love this Lord Akeldama — unsurprisingly, because here he was all business. He was not the adoptive father figure we came to know and love in the rest of the books. Here he was a scary vampire. In the other books we knew this side of him must exist, because you don’t get to be powerful as he is without being at least a little scary.
5) In the very end when Agatha agrees to stay, Pillover’s tears and relief — and Carriger’s explanation for them — are for all the right reasons. Agatha’s refusal to see herself as lovable, her eternal commitment to this slog of a career because she can’t imagine anything better even as she is being physically brutalized in the field, is ultimately a rejection of Pillover. When Agatha decides to stay, she is communicating to Pillover that he was not wrong to love her, not wrong to stay committed over so many years — even as people repeatedly told him to let her go.
I read this book slowly, truly relished it over the course of hours, read each word to savor it. Don’t start here. Start with literally every other Parasol Protectorate book that exists.
But once you get here, know that this lovely lovely end will be waiting for you.