A review by tessisreading2
City of Jasmine by Deanna Raybourn

3.0

Everybody in a Deanna Raybourn novel is always so charming and witty and dashing. It's exhausting, really. And it's pleasant to read about them but at the same time one begins to suspect that underneath the surface they're not necessarily very nice people. If it were an Evelyn Waugh novel, one would KNOW that they're not very nice people - that's the point - but in a Raybourn novel, one ends up feeling like one is supposed to like them.

Anyway, this one has the usual Raybourn hallmarks: first-person narrator who's slightly more annoying than we're supposed to think she is, eccentric aunt who is supposed to be more endearing than she actually is, and a love triangle that can only end with

Spoiler

the losing man turning out to be a villain

, which in this case wasn't adequately foreshadowed at all. Very much in the spirit of Indiana Jones or The Sheikh; Raybourn made efforts to escape the exoticism of the latter, but

Spoiler

the fact that Gabriel was the Falcon was fairly obvious and extremely annoying, especially given (a) there was not a really good explanation as to why it had to be a White Savior given that no one knew that he was white, and (b) that he immediately renounced the title.

The political stuff was faintly awkward; Raybourn had done her research, clearly, but it's difficult to pull in politically-correct modern-day non-exoticized history of the Near East while writing an old-school Thrilling Adventure. She managed pretty well, but there was almost too much going on.