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rosieclaverton's review
4.0
As the cover of Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders is gay and bright, so the darker, brooding cover of The Child of Ill Fortune should signal the series' turn into something much more sinister.
Kitty's assent to the role of Baron is marked by mistakes - painful mistakes, each of which haunts her. While there are moments of joy in this book, most of the outlook is bleak. Griffin does an excellent job of fleshing out the work with details and anecdotes, but that does not take away from the darkness.
It is an excellent book, but it is not a happy one. I await the third book with trepidation...
Kitty's assent to the role of Baron is marked by mistakes - painful mistakes, each of which haunts her. While there are moments of joy in this book, most of the outlook is bleak. Griffin does an excellent job of fleshing out the work with details and anecdotes, but that does not take away from the darkness.
It is an excellent book, but it is not a happy one. I await the third book with trepidation...
claire_loves_books's review
2.0
This was real struggle to finish, I hadn't read the first book so that might have been some of the problem but I just wasn't that interested in the characters or the story line. The story line felt contrived and full of mysterious plot holes, it relied a lot on Kitty storming around and making big speeches and promises but then never actually following through, I felt like she was a pretty weak character. The barons loom large but make a brief appearance at the end and don't actually show any real power.
Spoiler
That David turned out to be Della really annoyed me, Haemophilia is a recessive gene and it's carried on the x gene, girls have two (one from each parent) and boys get one (one from their mother) so if Robbie (a male) was a haemophiliac he got it from his mother- Della i.e. he didn't get it from his royal Russian father. It's just annoying, the author clearly did a bit of research but that it's carried on the x gene is pretty basic.jenpsz's review
5.0
This is the second Kitty Peck book, you may know. The twists and turns were well worth the difficulty I had “getting in to” the first book. It was brilliant. Read it.
trusselltales's review
4.0
Sharp, witty and fast moving story with a great sense of time and place. Kitty Peck has been passed the running of Paradise from the former Baron, and in this book is finding her feet in the insalubrious Victorian London underworld; she is also drawn by her formerly-feared-dead brother into the threatened life and mystery of a baby boy who has powerful enemies...Really enjoyed this!
lucy_anywhere's review
adventurous
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
raven88's review
4.0
Following Kate Griffin’s debut Victorian crime thriller, Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders, we once again find ourselves transported back to the 1880s to the gaslit alleyways of Limehouse. Kitty has now inherited Paradise, a criminal network previously ruled by the fearsome Lady Ginger. Though she’s a teenage girl, Kitty finds herself head of this criminal empire and is desperate to assert her authority in the face of her fellow Barons, who run London’s other criminal organisations.
Due to events in the first book, Kitty is estranged from her beloved brother, Joey, and travels to Paris with her loyal Italian sidekick Lucca to seek him out. When she tracks him down, he asks her to help him by smuggling a baby of uncertain background back to London. They do this but within days of her return to England, attempts are made to find and murder the child by perpetrators unknown, for reasons unclear. Just what is the importance of this baby, and how is he linked to a secret at the heart of the British Empire?
It’s always a good sign when, having missed the first of the series, the second inspires you to seek it out forthwith. Due to Kate Griffin’s authentic depiction of both the period and environs of Victorian London, you cannot help but be completely immersed in the penny dreadful atmosphere of the novel. By re-imagining the theatrical world that Kitty operates her businesses within, both legal and illegal, Griffin gives us a real sense of day-to-day life in the Victorian entertainment scene. Mirroring the attention to period detail shown by other Victorian crime fiction writers such as Lee Jackson, the world of the music hall sings from the page. Equally, Griffin captures perfectly the overall look and feel of the less salubrious aspects of both London and Paris from graveyards to sewer sytems, and the befouled streets that lie between them.
The author balances the more natural characters in The Child of Ill Fortune with a random cast of grotesques in the true spirit of the penny dreadful. Kitty is charming throughout, and is quickly growing into her new responsibilities, feeling her way inch by inch into this unknown world that Lady Ginger has bequeathed to her. There is a wonderful balance between the more girlish aspects of her personality and the maturity she assumes as the book progresses. Aided by her stalwart companion Lucca; the air-headed Peggy, who is entrusted with the care of the baby; and the sinister figure of Tan Seng, her Chinese protector, Kitty has a solid group of good guys. And with good guys come bad guys, some obvious and some not so, particularly the Machiavellian figure of the odious Lady Ginger herself, who keeps Kitty on her toes and sometimes completely in the dark. All of the characters, whether centre stage or passing through, are beautifully realised and more importantly, believable.
Although the plot is a little patchy in places, this shouldn’t impede your enjoyment of the book as a whole. Read in the spirit of a traditional Victorian entertainment, Kitty Peck and the Child of Ill Fortune is full of rum doings, pantomime villains, passion and violence, interspersed with colourful colloquialisms and bawdy language. A few too many similes make their appearance, which gets a little irritating, but in the grand scheme of things that matters not a jot. Tremendous fun.
Due to events in the first book, Kitty is estranged from her beloved brother, Joey, and travels to Paris with her loyal Italian sidekick Lucca to seek him out. When she tracks him down, he asks her to help him by smuggling a baby of uncertain background back to London. They do this but within days of her return to England, attempts are made to find and murder the child by perpetrators unknown, for reasons unclear. Just what is the importance of this baby, and how is he linked to a secret at the heart of the British Empire?
It’s always a good sign when, having missed the first of the series, the second inspires you to seek it out forthwith. Due to Kate Griffin’s authentic depiction of both the period and environs of Victorian London, you cannot help but be completely immersed in the penny dreadful atmosphere of the novel. By re-imagining the theatrical world that Kitty operates her businesses within, both legal and illegal, Griffin gives us a real sense of day-to-day life in the Victorian entertainment scene. Mirroring the attention to period detail shown by other Victorian crime fiction writers such as Lee Jackson, the world of the music hall sings from the page. Equally, Griffin captures perfectly the overall look and feel of the less salubrious aspects of both London and Paris from graveyards to sewer sytems, and the befouled streets that lie between them.
The author balances the more natural characters in The Child of Ill Fortune with a random cast of grotesques in the true spirit of the penny dreadful. Kitty is charming throughout, and is quickly growing into her new responsibilities, feeling her way inch by inch into this unknown world that Lady Ginger has bequeathed to her. There is a wonderful balance between the more girlish aspects of her personality and the maturity she assumes as the book progresses. Aided by her stalwart companion Lucca; the air-headed Peggy, who is entrusted with the care of the baby; and the sinister figure of Tan Seng, her Chinese protector, Kitty has a solid group of good guys. And with good guys come bad guys, some obvious and some not so, particularly the Machiavellian figure of the odious Lady Ginger herself, who keeps Kitty on her toes and sometimes completely in the dark. All of the characters, whether centre stage or passing through, are beautifully realised and more importantly, believable.
Although the plot is a little patchy in places, this shouldn’t impede your enjoyment of the book as a whole. Read in the spirit of a traditional Victorian entertainment, Kitty Peck and the Child of Ill Fortune is full of rum doings, pantomime villains, passion and violence, interspersed with colourful colloquialisms and bawdy language. A few too many similes make their appearance, which gets a little irritating, but in the grand scheme of things that matters not a jot. Tremendous fun.
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