Parlor trick
Wondering Sight (The Extraordinaries, #2) by Melissa McShane (2017): 5 out of 10: I was a big fan of the first Extraordinaries novel. It was well-written, confidently built, and centered on a heroine whose power set was, bluntly, a lot of fun. A young woman setting pirates on fire has a certain immediate advantage in fiction. It is hard not to be entertained by that. So going into Wandering Sight, I suspected we would be shifting to a different Extraordinary, both because the first book had very neatly wrapped up its romance and because there was, quite literally, a different woman on the cover. My detective skills remain unmatched.
This time around we follow Sophia, a wealthy widow and Extraordinary Seer whose gift allows her to read the past, present, and future of objects she touches. That is, on paper, a perfectly respectable supernatural talent. In execution, however, it leads the book into a much moodier, quieter, more drawing-room-and-dreams sort of story than its predecessor.
Instead of Caribbean adventure and flaming pirate decks, we get London society, headaches, visions, whispered menace, emotional misunderstandings, and a counterfeiting plot. None of that is inherently bad. In fact, parts of it are very well done. But it does mean Wandering Sight has to work harder to generate tension, and it does not always get there.
The Good
The Good: Melissa McShane can write. That remains the big selling point of this series. The prose is polished, the pacing is smooth, and the historical texture is consistently appealing. She has a knack for period detail that never feels like showing off for its own sake. Clothing, furnishings, manners, language, all the little bits of texture that make a world feel inhabited rather than merely researched, are handled with real confidence. I am always a sucker for an author who knows the correct vocabulary for period objects and uses it naturally, and this book is full of that sort of thing.
The world-building also continues to be one of the series’ strengths. The different varieties of extraordinary powers remain interesting as a setting concept, even when an individual power is not especially exciting on the page. There is still a sense here that this is a functioning alternate historical world rather than just Regency wallpaper with magic glued onto it.
Sophia herself works best when the book lets her do something active or reckless. When she is sneaking into the villain’s townhome, hiding under beds, poking into bad parts of London, or generally making bad but energetic decisions, the novel picks up considerably. The friendship material with her friend and mansion roommate Cece also helps ground the story. These scenes add some badly needed emotional depth, and for a while they suggest a more interesting book than the one Wandering Sight sometimes settles into.
There are also moments late in the novel where the Seer power gets used in more inventive ways. Seeing through someone else’s sight by way of a ring is a neat wrinkle, and there are flashes here and there of the kind of eerie, old-fashioned supernatural mystery this book might have been if it had leaned harder into that side of itself.
The Bad
The Bad: The central problem is that Sophia is simply not as compelling a heroine as the lead from the first book. Not because she is flawed, mind you. Flawed protagonists can be terrific. It is because she is often childish, self-centered, emotionally exhausting, and not especially pleasant to spend time with. Wondering Sight does not always seem fully aware of how off-putting she can be.
There is a version of this novel where Sophia’s volatility, entitlement, and obsessive behavior are the point of the narrative. A book where her friends and love interest are genuinely worn down by her and where she is forced to reckon with herself in a serious way. That could have been fascinating. What we get instead is a heroine who behaves like a brat often enough that one starts wondering why everyone around her remains so patient.
Sophia spends a great deal of time refusing to acknowledge what is obvious to everyone. She clings to a long forgotten grievance that makes her seem less wounded than immature. Since she is not a sheltered girl in her first courtship but a previously married, socially powerful widow, that immaturity lands differently than it would have with the heroine of the first book. It is harder to excuse, and the novel does not always make the emotional case for it.
Then there is the superpower itself. A Seer’s gift is not useless, but it is passive. The book tries. It really does. It finds a few interesting applications for visions and dreams, especially near the end. But for long stretches, Sophia’s power boils down to moody psychic impressions, stress dreams, and clues that are either too vague or too easy to mistake for ordinary anxiety. This is one of those abilities that sounds more exciting in summary than it feels in the scene. Too often it gives the book the energy of an old black-and-white séance movie, all large houses, frail nerves, and impending collapse. That mood has its charms, but it is not exactly a replacement for action or romance. Unfortunately author Melissa McShane fails to really lean into it. In reality over the 392 Pages she fails to lean into anything.
The Ugly
The Ugly: Our villain Lord Endicott is a problem as well. One of my complaints about the first book was that the antagonist felt a bit too obviously villainous, and Wandering Sight makes the same mistake. Lord Endicott is talked about far more than he actually appears. The book occasionally threatens to add a little gray to him, which would have helped enormously, but it never truly commits.
He remains smarmy, obsessive, and theatrical in a way that makes him less sinister than faintly silly. His motivation for revenge on Sophia is somehow weaker and more foolish than her motivation for revenge on him. They kind of deserve each other.
Worse, the actual stakes are remarkably low for how much anguish the novel wrings out of them. We are, more or less, defending Victorian England from poor monetary policy. Yes, counterfeiting matters. Yes, an economy can be destabilized. But as central dramatic stakes go, “stop the inflation plot” is a hard sell, particularly when the book itself does not deliver enough set pieces or suspense to compensate. There is some stabbing, some slashing, a bit more action late than early, but not enough memorable material to make the story feel bigger than the sum of its headaches and social embarrassment.
There is also a nagging sense that the book occasionally chooses mystical obscurity over obvious practical solutions. If there are six possible counterfeiting locations, perhaps send the police to the six locations rather than a three page dream sequence involving doors.
When Sophia does not know what a money-printing operation looks like suggestions like perhaps visit a library or the Treasury are absent. The more the book leaned on visions as a superior investigative method, the more I found myself wanting somebody in the room to suggest ordinary detective work.
And then there is the uncomfortable truth that Sophia and the villain sometimes feel less like moral opposites than adjacent varieties of obsessive lunatic. The book does gesture toward this late, with some of her friends calling her out, but by then it is a little too late to reframe what we have already spent most of the novel watching.
And that leads to the romance, which never fully catches fire. Her love interest, Mr. Rutledge, is decent, supportive, wealthy, broad-shouldered, and so accommodating that by the end I almost wanted him to turn out to be the villain simply to give him a pulse.
To make matters worse, their final acknowledgement of their apparently mutual feelings started with “Mr. Nice Guy” telling Sophia that he is too old for her and is a confirmed bachelor stuck in his ways. And telling her to find someone closer to her own age.
I mean, she is a seer who watched through his eyes for a chapter or two. She would know if he was gay, right? I can’t imagine she would be blindsided by this with her particular superpower.
Yet I am trying to figure out her suitor’s angle in all this. Is he secretly gay? Does he just not like her and is so passive he can’t figure a way to tell her? I mean, he tells her he wants to be friends more often than two children on the first day of kindergarten. We may be dealing with an unreliable narrator when it comes to the tepid romance of Sophia and Mr. Rutledge. I am unclear if he has even told her his first name. And he is described as such a poorly dressed giant one’s mind can’t help go to Hagrid.
In Conclusion
In Conclusion: Wandering Sight has two major problems.
The first is that the superpower simply is not very interesting. I have talk about this above, but the Seer ability keeps reminding me of one of those old black-and-white Roger Corman-style early 1960s movies about séances, large white houses, and nervous women on cliffs. (Think The Amazing Mr. X, or Gordon Lightfoot’s song If You Could Read My Mind) There is a certain atmosphere to it, and the book does some genuinely interesting things with the power near the end. In particular, there is a clever bit where Sophia is able to see directly through someone else’s sight by means of the ring, and people are writing her notes telling her what is happening. That is inventive enough. But in practical terms, it is not all that different from giving somebody a cell phone. It is a passive ability, and that passivity hurts the book.
The second major problem is the protagonist herself. Sophia is extremely self-centered, emotionally stunted, childish, and in many ways responsible for much of the misery in her own life. She spends an impressive amount of time straining or damaging the friendships she does have, to the point where one starts to wonder why any of these people are still her friends. It almost makes sense that the only love interest she can manage is a man sixteen years older than she is.
Even the happy-ending romantic material at the end feels oddly juvenile. I am not saying every character has to behave with total adult poise at all times, but when two grown people are alone in a room after everything they have been through, it is hard to understand why they still cannot talk to each other like adults. Nobody is listening at the door. Neither of them is fourteen. Neither of them is a virgin. At some point, one expects a basic conversation.
Second, the villain is really an idiot. He is talked about far more than he actually appears, and when he does appear he never comes across as especially formidable. The book, through Sophia, wants us to think of him as clearly insane, dangerously obsessive, and fundamentally unbalanced, and that may well be true. But the novel also seems to use that as a partial excuse for the fact that he is not very smart and often behaves illogically.
In a lot of ways, he and the heroine deserve each other. Which, now that I think about it, may actually be one of the accidental themes of the book. He remains bizarrely obsessed with revenge on her for interfering with his scheme in Spain, whereas most criminals in his position would probably count themselves lucky, move on, and perhaps avoid the woman who can literally see things other people cannot.
Meanwhile, halfway through the novel, Sophia is so fixated on him that she more or less wants him dead so long as she does not get blamed for it. The book insists that she is the good guy and he is the bad guy, and I do accept that in the broad sense. But I can easily imagine a sharper, stranger version of this story where the line between the two felt much less secure.
I love the writing. I love the descriptions. I love the use of period-appropriate language, the correct vocabulary for the era, the little touches involving furniture, clothing, pianos, shawls, and all the rest. I just can’t help think that poor Mr. Rutledge is going to spend the rest of his years above ground walking on eggshells in some circle of Dante’s Inferno. Not really the Happy Ever After the author was trying to land I suppose.
Random Notes from reading
Now we have book two in The Extraordinaries series. I was very much a fan of book one. It was extremely well written, with some great worldbuilding centered on a young woman who was an extraordinary Scorcher and, as I said before, pirates on fire is a pretty good hook.
I suspected book two would focus on a different extraordinary young woman, partly because the ending of the first book involved a very happy wedding and the completion of that romance, and partly because there was a different woman on the cover. My amazing powers of deduction turned out to be correct.
This time we are following a young woman who is an extraordinary Seer. Her gift allows her, by touching an object, to see its past, its present, and its future, along with its secrets. That is a terrific power for a mystery plot, and the book seems to know it.
When we meet her, she is at the end of her military service, or more accurately, she has been forced out of it. She accused a lord of malfeasance, but that lord arranged for the evidence to disappear and for a clerk to be murdered. Since he was an extraordinary Shaper, with the ability to appear beautiful, innocent, or whatever else was needed, he convinced the War Office that she was simply mistaken.
They approached her with the polite version of events: surely she had made an error. She refused to say she was wrong, which created a quiet scandal, and so she was pushed out. None of this became public, so her reputation remains intact, but her career is over.
Meanwhile, this same lord is still lurking around London, forcing dances on her, meeting her on horseback, and generally teasing and needling her in a way that is clearly meant to be menacing beneath the surface charm.
She is now in London caring for her oldest friend, who suffers from some undefined illness that leaves her in terrible pain from time to time. That adds a note of gravity to the story and gives the heroine a personal life beyond the obvious romantic plot.
As for the love interest, the book has not fully admitted it yet, but I am fairly sure it is Mr. Haverock. One reason I suspect this is that the heroine is a widow, her husband, a Bounder, was killed in the war, and she is financially comfortable enough that she claims she does not need to remarry.
She says she would only do so if she were thoroughly swept off her feet. Naturally, the man she describes as her ideal is the exact opposite of the man standing in front of her. The man in question is wealthy, tall, dark-featured, and rather heavyset, whereas her supposed ideal is very different. Which, of course, is exactly how these books tend to go. Also, for that matter, life.
There have also been some nice little character surprises. She has distant family connections through her late husband, grandchildren or younger relations of some sort, and I expected that relationship to be strained or awkward. Instead, she gets along extremely well with them. One of the girls in particular seems young, excitable, and eager to become a Bounder, and yet there is a genuinely warm friendship there. That is a nice touch.
So far the book is giving us parties, dinner parties, social maneuvering, and the sort of detailed scene setting this author does extremely well. She paints locations, clothing, and atmosphere with real skill. You probably do not need to have read the first book to enjoy this one, but it certainly helps. The Scorcher heroine from the first book has been mentioned a few times, though she has not appeared, and I do not necessarily expect her to.
The mystery is beginning to come into focus as well. It looks as though the villainous lord accused earlier may also be tied to a major counterfeiting ring, which is a wonderfully old-fashioned sort of plot. Something that sounds like it wandered in from a very sophisticated Hardy Boys mystery by way of the Napoleonic era. Still, criminals do need a hobby.
I fully expect that, despite the heroine being a widow, this is still going to be a fairly chaste romance. I am not anticipating much more than kisses on the cheek, and that is perfectly fine. The previous book was not that sort of romance either. What I am really enjoying here is the author’s ability to paint the setting, especially the sense of place and the way she renders the social world around the heroine.
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The friendship, and perhaps eventual romance, is continuing to blossom between Sophia, our lead lady and Seer, and the tall, dark, rich, handsome man who rather rudely offered her a mysterious job at the beginning of the book. They have moved from mutual irritation into something closer to friendship, and since this is a romance novel, one suspects that friendship is not exactly where the train will stop.
Meanwhile, Lord Evil Counterfeiter Man has finally had one of those classic “I am the bad guy, but I am speaking in metaphors so nobody can prove it” conversations with her. The actual topic was hunting, but the subtext was not exactly subtle. He explained the dangers of the hunt, how sometimes the hunter becomes the prey, and so on. You know the sort of thing. Perfectly enjoyable in its way, but not exactly the height of criminal subtlety.
This ties into one of the bones I had to pick with the first book, and it is a bone I am starting to pick with this one as well. In the first book, if memory serves, we had the love interest captain and the horrible evil cowardly captain. I thought that book might have been stronger, or at least more interesting, if the second captain had been a bit more rounded, less obvious, less mustache-twirling. Not a secret love interest, obviously. That is not the point. Just a more layered antagonist.
And I am starting to feel the same way here. Lord Endicott, or whatever his exact name is, is drifting into that same territory. I am not saying he should be sympathetic. I am not saying he cannot be a criminal. I am not even saying he needs to be morally complex in a modern prestige television sense. But he is edging a little too close to full theatrical villainy.
He reminds me of the sort of bad guy you get in a particularly florid swashbuckler sequel, the kind where the villains are so cartoonishly over the top that they become funny in spite of themselves. The specific comparison that came to mind was one of those Zorro sequels, where the villains were so hilariously excessive that they might as well have had a wine cellar with a giant picture of the globe and a stone serpent wrapped around it. That level of nonsense. Lord Flashpants is not quite there, but he is peeking over the fence.
So once again, I am loving the worldbuilding, the detail work, and the social atmosphere. But I do have to dock the book slightly for giving us another antagonist who seems to think subtle menace is for other people.
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So Sophia, our Seer, is having something of a slow-moving mental breakdown, brought on by doing too much Seeing, by her growing obsession with catching Lord Flashpants Endicott or whatever his name is, and by her realization that she is in love with the older, heavyset Bank of England man who now appears to have betrayed her.
The reason she feels betrayed is that he keeps turning up exactly where he should not, and it turns out he has been involved in the investigation all along, possibly even reading her dreams, depending on how one wants to phrase it. He is, in short, far more entangled in everything than she realized. Which, admittedly, you would think she might have figured out sooner, being a Seer and all. But apparently not, even though it is fairly obvious to everyone actually reading the book.
Sophia is also lashing out at the people around her. She got genuinely angry with her young lady friend for being concerned about her health, even though everyone in the book keeps pointing out that she looks utterly exhausted and half-ruined. She is clearly running herself into the ground, and the novel is not exactly subtle about showing that.
Now she is on her way to a party with an obnoxious woman where, unfortunately, she has agreed to perform as a Seer, and this feels very much like one of those situations that is obviously going to end in embarrassment, disaster, revelation, or some pleasing combination of all three.
In the meantime, she has also gone full Nancy Drew and wandered into the bad part of London to investigate why certain visions and dreams are not lining up correctly. One thing the book is doing well is that it is not entirely fooled by her point of view.
Sophia herself does not seem to realize that she has become obsessive and half-unhinged, but the novel does. Since the story is filtered through her perspective, that creates an interesting balancing act: we are inside her head enough to understand her motives, but the book still quietly signals that she is not behaving like the most stable person in the room.
Overall, though, it remains very well written. It is a pleasant read, easy to follow, and the action and intrigue move along cleanly. Sophia is not quite as charismatic as the lead from the first book, at least not so far. She is certainly not as bold, and she is definitely not out there setting pirates on fire. But she does bring a different flavor to the story.
In fact, the book has a very pleasing old fashioned feel to it. It almost plays like one of those 1950s or 1960s Gothic tinged suspense stories. Something with a woman in a large house on a cliff, a frail or sickly relation, séances, secrets, social whispers, and a vague sense that somebody is trying to maneuver everybody else out of their money. It has a little of that old black-and-white melodrama atmosphere, and the Seer angle fits that mood surprisingly well.
So far, then, I am enjoying the book, and I am glad I decided to try the second entry in the series. It is not simply repeating what the first novel did. It is trying for a different heroine, a different tone, and a more fragile kind of intrigue.
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Well, we have now hit the crux of the book, or at least the low point for the protagonist. Sophia is finally at her nadir, forced to face off against the obnoxious duchess while under enormous stress, nursing headaches, half-ruined physically and emotionally, and stuck at the center of attention.
And then here it comes, the big collapse.
She faints.
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So Sophia faints at the party, wakes up with the big, hulking, wealthy, charming rescue man. The good guy she swore off just in the last chapter and declared her greatest enemy because apparently she is twelve years old, and then proceeds to decide that she is going to stop chasing visions, stop overusing her gift, stop obsessing, and generally start behaving with some degree of common sense.
Naturally, this lasts about five minutes. Because then her friend (niece?) tells her she can sneak him into the big fancy house or townhome or whatever the exact setup is, and Sophia is immediately on the verge of backing out of every promise she just made.
So far: mediocre. And I think this is where the comparison with the first book starts to hurt it.
This is a follow-up to a first novel where the heroine was, among other things, setting pirates on fire. That is a difficult act to follow. Here, by contrast, we have a heroine who is simply not as compelling. Sophia is not as reliable or as charismatic as the heroine of book one. She comes across as much whinier, and she has a lot less of that straightforward go get them energy.
Part of that is structural. Her gift set is very different. She is a dreamer, a Seer, a séance-lady sort of figure, not someone with the ability to stride onto the deck and set a pirate ablaze. That naturally makes for a quieter, more inward, less kinetic book.
Her love interest is also a little less charismatic than the romantic lead in the first novel. The enemies are actually fairly decent, although still a bit broad in places. But the larger issue is that this whole book takes place in London. We do not have Caribbean adventures, naval action, or that larger sense of movement and danger.
That means the author really has to make the social tension sing. If the book is going to rely on dinner parties, drawing rooms, whispered insults, visions, and counterfeiting plots, then those scenes need to land with real force. And to be fair, some authors absolutely can pull that off.
Entire novels have lived or died on the drama of social embarrassment, romantic misunderstanding, and drawing-room warfare. But this book has swung and missed a few times in that department. The tension at these parties and social encounters is not always as gripping as it needs to be.
Now, there are still some genuinely strong things here. The detail work remains excellent. The descriptive writing is very good. The use of period language and period detail, whether in clothing, furnishings, pianos, or the general texture of Victorian life, is handled extremely well. The book is not bad by any means.
It just feels a little slight compared to its predecessor. And with the central premise being “a lady with visions tries to foil a counterfeiting ring,” the novel really needs a little more excitement around the edges to compensate.
So far, that extra spark has not quite materialized. There is not going to be much sexual heat here; this is clearly a very chaste romance, and I doubt that is going to change suddenly. But the problem is not simply the lack of sex. It is that the book is not fully making up for that restraint with either action or especially electric relationship dynamics.
So at the moment, I do not hate it at all. It is still competently written, and in some ways quite well done. But I am definitely less invested in both the heroine and her story than I was in the first book.
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Oh, what a difference a couple of chapters can make.I am actually back to liking the protagonist again. “Liking” may be a bit strong, but I am at least back to being a fan of her spunk.
With help from her cousin, whose bright idea this apparently was, Sophia bounds into the bad guy’s townhome to investigate, only to wind up hiding under the bed when the villain comes home early and starts berating the servants. Which, honestly, is at least more lively than fainting at a party.
The book does something interesting here: it threatens the possibility that the bad guy may not be entirely a bad guy after all. Notice I said threatens the possibility. I do not really think the novel is going to follow through on that, but it was still a welcome move.
One of my major complaints about the first book was that the villain was so obviously villainous, and so over-the-top about it, that it took a little something out of the story. Here, for at least a moment, there is the suggestion that this antagonist might have a little gray around the edges. I am not holding my breath, but it would be nice if the author actually commits to that.
After escaping the townhouse, Sophia finally confesses everything to her best friend and roommate, Cece, whose medical troubles Sophia has been helping her manage. In return, Cece opens up about her own pain: she has been doing charity work, but she cannot bear to be around the babies because she has been trying unsuccessfully to have one of her own. Sophia, for her part, admits that she went to the townhouse despite having promised otherwise, and the two of them more or less agree to help each other through the power of friendship.
That is all rather well handled, actually. It gives the book some emotional grounding beyond the mystery plot and reminds us that Sophia does have real human connections, not just obsessions and headaches.
The love interest is only mentioned in passing in these chapters and does not actually appear, to the point that he may currently have no idea he is still in this book, if you know what I mean.
So overall, at least the story is doing something again. It is still apparently a counterfeiting ring they are trying to break up, and the big bad Earl still seems to be plotting to undermine the government by printing money. Perhaps he is secretly French. We shall see.
For the moment, though, the novel has regained some momentum.
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Well, on the plus side, there has been more action. There has been quite a bit of stabbing, or at least attempted stabbing, perhaps some light slashing. So that is good news.
Bad news, though: I am afraid the weaknesses are starting to pile up. For one thing, I legitimately got a little lost on the plot. As in: huh?
Our heroine goes to one of those party games, charades for rich people, more or less, except this one appears to function as a sort of Victorian key party where everyone is randomly assigned a gentleman or lady for the evening, to dance with, dine with, and generally circulate beside. (If you are thinking Eyes Wide Shut you can get that thought out of your head right now)
Sophia gets paired with a gentleman connected to the horrible evil bad guy, and this fellow decides it is his personal mission to protect her from the villain, or save her for the villain, or something to that effect. Meanwhile, her actual love interest, who she still refuses to properly acknowledge as her love interest, is assigned to someone else, and she becomes jealous of that person despite the fact that she herself seems to forget this is all just a party game.
Then someone says there is a visitor at the door for her, and it turns out to be the other Seer, which upsets her greatly, and then her love interest rescues her again. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I got a bit confused.
And I think I have finally identified the deeper root of my problem.
Yes, I have been comparing this book to the first one, perhaps a little unfairly, but I think the comparison is useful. The first book had a heroine who set pirates on fire. This book has a heroine who has visions and dreams. That is already a harder sell for me. I do not naturally gravitate toward the “moody psychic in a drawing room” end of the spectrum the way I do toward “young woman with fire powers on a ship.”
But there is another issue, and it is more important. The first book’s heroine was, if I recall correctly, a rebellious teenage girl or at least a very young woman. She was a virgin. She had never had a serious relationship, probably never even had a serious courtship. She had been kissed once, against her will, by some cad at a party.
In other words, she was exactly the sort of heroine who can credibly make mistakes in love, misunderstand signals, lurch from emotion to emotion, and generally not know what she is doing. That made sense for the character.
But our current heroine is a widow. She worked in the war effort, in or around the War Office, perhaps in Spain or somewhere similar. She is extremely wealthy, socially important, and willing to use that power when it suits her. Unlike the fire girl from book one, who at least initially hid her powers, this heroine openly announces hers: she wears gloves specifically to signal that she is a Seer, and people know exactly what those gloves mean. She is rich, powerful, experienced, previously married, and socially established. She is, in every practical sense, a much more formidable adult.
So why is she such a brat? That is really the issue. Personality-wise, she is all over the place. As stabby as the villains are, our heroine can be pretty unlikable herself.
Now, I do not object in principle to an unlikable protagonist. There are plenty of wealthy, immature thirty year old women in fiction and in real life. That is not the problem.
My problem is that I am not convinced the book recognizes this as a flaw. I do not know that the novel sees her volatility, entitlement, and emotional absolutism as genuine character defects that ought to have consequences. Those traits could be very interesting if the book really leaned into them, if they damaged friendships, if they pushed away the love interest, if they caused real trouble. But I am not sure that is what is happening.
Take her attitude toward the love interest. He has now saved her multiple times from actual danger, been supportive almost beyond reason, comes from a good family, has land, wealth, position, and has apologized profusely for every misunderstanding between them. And yet she still insists she cannot possibly be with him because, when they first met, he did not immediately believe one of her visions or dreams.
That is not the attitude of a seasoned Victorian widow with money, power, and supernatural gifts. That is the attitude of a cult leader who expects total ideological loyalty from the room before she starts taking donations.
Again, I know perfectly well that real people can behave exactly like this. I am not arguing that it is unrealistic in the abstract. I am saying I am not convinced the novel itself fully understands what kind of personality it has written.
Part of the problem may also be the visions themselves. I am not entirely sure how I am supposed to read them. When Sophia dreams of the villain tearing the wings off a butterfly that screams like her, is that just a stress dream? Is it symbolic? Is it a literal supernatural clue about what he plans to do to her friends? I genuinely do not know.
The book seems to lean toward the idea that her visions are deeply meaningful and that, in-universe, we are more or less supposed to trust them. The party line appears to be that our heroine is functionally infallible, or at least that her visions are. But that makes her less interesting. Detectives should be able to make mistakes. That is part of what makes them compelling.
One reason I keep hoping for a twist, however unlikely, is that it would help with this problem. If the book were willing to pull some sort of switch and reveal that the supposed villain was not entirely what Sophia believed, that would immediately make both him and her more interesting. Because at the moment, most of the tangible bad-guy activity has actually come from her pursuit of him, while his villainy, so far, remains somewhat nebulous except for the fact that he is handsome, smarmy, and appears ominous in her dreams. I know full well he is almost certainly running the counterfeiting ring, because this is that kind of book. But still.
If the next few chapters hoist Sophia by her own petard, if the book deliberately forces her to confront the consequences of her certainty, I will happily take a lot of this back. But right now, it feels as though the novel is heading in a different direction.
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Well, I always seem to be meandering toward a conclusion with these things.
Our bad guy has now exposed the original inciting incident in the newspapers, which apparently raises the possibility that our heroine could be arrested. I am a little unclear on precisely what she is meant to be arrested for, but let us simply call them trumped-up charges and move on.
Meanwhile, our nice-guy love interest has finally said whatever exact magic words she needed to hear about believing her original vision, and she has accordingly melted to some degree. He really is such a people-pleaser, and such a fundamentally decent man, that even this late in the game part of me almost wants him to turn out to be the surprise villain just so he can stop being quite so accommodating. That is not the book we are in, of course, but the thought did cross my mind.
Our actual villain is less impressive. Apparently he has a partner doing the actual counterfeiting in one of six possible locations, and much is made of Sophia discovering a new visionary ability where she essentially enters a dream within a dream. Very Inception, or whatever dream-layering movie we are invoking here.
And yet, instead of doing the obvious practical thing, sending the police to all six known locations at once and seeing which one turns out to contain the counterfeiting operation, the book continues to lean on visions and intuition.
Sophia also, for some reason, does not seem to know what a money-printing press would look like, which feels like a problem that could be solved with one trip to the Treasury or the library. This is not an insoluble mystery. There are practical avenues available here.
So yes, we are lurching toward a conclusion. It is not awful by any stretch of the imagination. The book remains readable, competent, and often pleasantly written. I am simply not as much of a fan of this heroine as I have been of other leads, and, if I am being honest, the vision and dream aspect of her gift is just not inherently as exciting to me as some of the other extraordinary abilities in the series.
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Wandering Sight has two major problems.
The first is that the superpower simply is not very interesting. I have talked around this before, but the Seer ability keeps reminding me of one of those old black-and-white Roger Corman-style early 1960s movies about séances, large white houses, and nervous women on cliffs. (Think The Amazing Mr. X, or Gordon Lightfoot’s song If You Could Read My Mind) There is a certain atmosphere to it, and the book does some genuinely interesting things with the power near the end. In particular, there is a clever bit where Sophia is able to see directly through someone else’s sight by means of the ring, and people are writing her notes telling her what is happening. That is inventive enough. But in practical terms, it is not all that different from giving somebody a cell phone. It is a passive ability, and that passivity hurts the book.
The second major problem is the protagonist herself. And by that I do not mean “morally pure.” I mean pleasant to be around. Sophia is extremely self-centered, emotionally stunted, childish, and in many ways responsible for much of the misery in her own life. She spends an impressive amount of time straining or damaging the friendships she does have, to the point where one starts to wonder why any of these people are still her friends. It almost makes sense that the only love interest she can manage is a man sixteen years older than she is and, apparently, built a bit like Hagrid.
Even the happy-ending romantic material at the end feels oddly juvenile. I am not saying every character has to behave with total adult poise at all times, but when two grown people are alone in a room after everything they have been through, it is hard to understand why they still cannot talk to each other like adults. Nobody is listening at the door. Neither of them is fourteen. Neither of them is a virgin. At some point, one expects a basic conversation.
There are two related problems on top of that.
First, the stakes are extremely low. We are essentially defending Victorian England against poor monetary policy. Yes, counterfeiting is bad, and yes, inflation matters, but as central plot stakes it feels a little light. Not every book has to be James Bond saving the world from nuclear annihilation, but this is still a story where the central menace is, more or less, financial instability. One can only imagine how they would all react when Britain eventually goes off the gold standard.
Second, the villain is really an idiot. He is talked about far more than he actually appears, and when he does appear he never comes across as especially formidable. The book, through Sophia, wants us to think of him as clearly insane, dangerously obsessive, and fundamentally unbalanced, and that may well be true. But the novel also seems to use that as a partial excuse for the fact that he is not very smart and often behaves illogically.
In a lot of ways, he and the heroine deserve each other. Which, now that I think about it, may actually be one of the accidental themes of the book. He remains bizarrely obsessed with revenge on her for interfering with his scheme in Spain, whereas most criminals in his position would probably count themselves lucky, move on, and perhaps avoid the woman who can literally see things other people cannot. Meanwhile, halfway through the novel, Sophia is so fixated on him that she more or less wants him dead so long as she does not get blamed for it. The book insists that she is the good guy and he is the bad guy, and I do accept that in the broad sense. But I can easily imagine a sharper, stranger version of this story where the line between the two felt much less secure.
To be fair, the novel does flirt with this idea. Some of Sophia’s friends do eventually call her out for acting like a lunatic while she is busy battling the other lunatic. But it is too little, too late.
And the trouble is, there is not much else to hang the happy ending on. I love the writing. I love the descriptions. I love the use of period-appropriate language, the correct vocabulary for the era, the little touches involving furniture, clothing, pianos, shawls, and all the rest. The book is not unpleasant to read by any stretch of the imagination. It is often quite graceful on the sentence level.
But there are not many exciting set pieces, memorable secondary characters, or standout moments I can imagine myself calling back to in a later review. Even the heroine’s slide toward obsession and the villain’s corresponding descent into madness are handled in a fairly light way. Nothing lands with quite the force it ought to.
So no, I do not think the book is bad. And yes, I do plan to read the third one, especially since it appears to focus on a Bounder rather than a dreamer, which already sounds more promising. But Wandering Sight feels like a lesser entry: competently written, atmospherically sound, but built around a power set and a heroine that never fully catch fire.
