The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels
Flying houses, daring heists, and a crew of witty, dangerous women take center stage in this pirate-inspired adventure. The banter is sharp, the stakes are high, and the romance sizzles beneath layers of clever scheming. A fun, fast-paced fantasy about found family and female solidarity.
Everything You Need to Know About The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels
The Wisteria Society is a genteel association of lady pirates who live in flying houses, steal things across Victorian England, and take their tea extremely seriously. Cecilia Bassingthwaighte was raised inside it by her aunt, Miss Darlington, and is quietly miserable, wanting a life with slightly more meaning and slightly less murder. Then Ned Lightbourne turns up, an assassin hired to kill her, who instead becomes inconvenient in the way handsome men do. Members of the Society start disappearing, Cecilia's dreadful mother is involved, and the whole thing plays out as arch comedy with houses crashing into each other. India Holton writes it like a Wodehouse novel that read too much Austen. If the joke lands for you it lands hard, and if it does not, nothing else here will save it.
The prose is the entire product. Holton commits to the bit for a full novel and never once winks at the reader. Flying houses are treated with the seriousness of property law. Miss Darlington is the best character in the book. It is also short and fast, which absurdist comedy needs to be.
Comic violence, murder and attempted murder played for laughs, kidnapping, an emotionally abusive mother, brief peril. Nothing graphic.
For readers who want enemies to lovers played entirely for laughs, and who enjoy a narrator with strong opinions about everyone. Low spice, high whimsy, short chapters. If you like your fantasy earnest or your romance angsty, this will read as insufferable inside twenty pages. Check the spice guide if heat level is what you are shopping for, because this is not the book for it.
Book one of the Dangerous Damsels series, followed by The League of Gentlewomen Witches and The Secret Service of Tea and Treason. Each book centers a different couple and works on its own, though the cast overlaps and they read better in order.
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