59. The Tin Princess by Philip Pullman

Whoo boy, faithful readers will notice the significant gap between this blog post and the last one, over a month! It's not that I gave up reading, but I got over-ambitious with a non-fiction book.  It's called The Life and Death of Ancient Cities and came highly recommended but hoo boy is it slow going! I finally had to put it on pause about halfway and get into some fun reading.  On top of that, I moved over to Bluesky with all the others after the election and it's quite fun and pleasant.  I hope it survives and its model can be a future path for social media.  Unfortunately, the goodness of it is not good for my internet addiction.  Twitter was such a shit hole that I barely went there, which was great for my reading. Now I am once again getting excellent feeds on the situations in Syria, South Korea and Georgia as well as reconnecting with great book and movie nerds (and even some sports people) so it is hard to pull away.

Nevertheless, I was able to finish the final book in Pullman's misnamed Sally Lockhart series.  It might be more accurate to call it his Victorian Penny Dreadful series or something.  This last book is a spinoff which focuses on two other characters in Sally's orbit (she at this point is more of an elder statesman of adventurous, boundary-breaking characters):  Jim Taylor who started as a courier in the law firm where Sally first went and is now a globe-trotting adventurer and writer (who never actually writes) and young Adelaid who was the cockney slave to the evil nemesis of the first book.

The Tin Princess feels very much like Pullman trying to do Sabatini or other books of English people having adventures abroad and getting mixed up in European politics.  Here, Adelaide ends up marrying a prince of the tiny central European country Razkavia who discovers her in a brothel (funny how I read this after watching Anora, which has a similar plot basis though very different storyline).  He barely survives a terrorist attack in London and then learns that his brother is killed and he is next in line for the throne, so Adelaide must accompany him back to Razkavia.  She meets a young well-educated Razkavian girl (who fled because her father had been imprisoned and killed) who becomes her ally and Jim goes along as well. Razkavia produces tin which is much needed by both Austria and Germany and it is thus caught between the machinations of these two superpowers.

It's all quite preposterous but also quite fun.   Jim shows his mettle several times.  The country of Razkavia is well thought out and portrayed.  It's fun to see poor, downtrodden Adelaide reveal that she actually has the native intelligence and mettle of a sovereign.  It all could be more tightly constructed and there is a bit too much going on for it to be concluded satisfactorily.  As usual with Pullman, he does a great job constructing super loathsome antagonists but never really gives the reader the satisfaction of them getting their just deserts in a deservingly brutal way.  In this case, it is nasty and manipulative chamberlain of the royal house, Godel.

So I've finished the 4 books and enjoyed them, but they weren't quite the thrills I had hoped for.  I think the whole thing would have been better had it remained centered around Sally Lockhart and the photography studio/detective agency.  We could still have had all the same adventures but with more unity and ongoing character development.  I understand that at the time, Pullman probably wrote where the muse sent him and that is fine, just left this reader with some dangling threads.  I think the excellent trade dress by Scholastic did a good job of selling them to me and may have set my expectations a bit high.