Sovay -- Celia Rees

Sovay takes its title (and the events chronicled in its first chapter) from an old folk song*:

Sovay, Sovay all on a day
She dressed herself in man's array
With a brace of pistols all by her side
To meet her true love, to meet her true love, away she'd ride.

As she was riding over the plain
She met her true love and bid him stand
'Stand and deliver, young sir,' she said
'And if you do not, and if you do not, I'll shoot you dead'

The big difference between the song and the story is this:  In the song, Sovay is putting her lover through a simple test, and he passes -- in Celia Rees' book, Sovay is pretty positively sure that her lover is untrue, she sets out to find out for sure, and in so doing, humiliate him.  Sovay, as you may have guessed, is not your average seventeen-year-old girl, in 1794 or any other year:

She stopped and looked directly at him.  A frank gaze, challenging and insolent, as direct and unwavering as if she was a young man.

'The real answer is no.  I do not like to look at myself.'

The painter laughed.  'All women like to look at themselves, young or old.'

When she is informed that there is a Bow Street runner on the way with a warrant to charge her father with, at the very least, sedition, she once again dons her brother's clothing and begins robbing coaches.  Her aim isn't to get rich -- it's to get hold of the evidence against her father, in an effort to save her family and her home.

First, the positive:  It's simply written, but with lots of detail, which makes the characters, settings and events very easy to picture in your mind's eye.  It's chock full of action, with some very effective exciting bits (Explosions!  Poison gas!  A hot air balloon!).  It made me want to read more about the French Revolution and its effect on neighboring countries, about Bow Street runners (who also pop up in the Darkside books), and I'm always up for reading more about secret societies!  In short, it's extremely readable.

I haven't had very good luck with my reading lately.  I was very much looking forward to this book, and I was, for the most part, disappointed.  On to the less positive:  I never developed any sort of rapport with or affection for the characters.  Sovay was brave, headstrong, bright, etc., etc., etc., and I found her adventures entertaining and exciting, but never really cared about her.  Or about the others, excepting maybe Captain Jack Greenwood.  (I'm a sucker for the highwayman type.)

I felt like the book was populated with stock characters -- the brave, adventurous, headstrong girl who has grown up without a mother and has therefore never developed an interest in the domestic arts, the steadfastly loyal servant(s) who have grown up with their mistress, the dashing highwayman, the whore-with-a-heart-of-gold (though there's a twist there -- the WWAHOG is Toby, who works for Mother Pierce, a madam who runs a brothel that provides male prostitutes to male clients) and, of course, the totally over-the-top sadist villain.  When I say over-the-top, I mean Over-The-Top.  Suddenly, halfway through the book, there is a section that wouldn't be at all out of place in a parody of a Gothic novel.  The Big Bad even has a torture chamber in his basement and an evil genius-type laboratory in a tower.  And an evil laugh!  That actually made me wonder if maybe it was supposed to be a parody, but the rest of the book didn't really read like that, so if it was, it totally went over my head.

There were also a lot of moments that felt like they wouldn't have been out of place in a stereotypical romance novel, and almost every handsome young man Sovay meets (and wow, are there a lot of them) seems to immediately under her spell.  When reading the book, I found it difficult not to imagine Keira Knightly's Elizabeth Swan.  It would make a rip-roarer of a summer blockbuster, for sure, but I was hoping for something more than that.  Maybe I'd have been less disappointed if I'd gone into the book with no hopes for anything in particular...

For older teens and adult readers, I'd highly recommend Ellen Kushner's The Privilege of the Sword instead -- more depth, stronger characterization, a believable love story and characters that you will root for, just plain lovely and just as much of a rip-roaring adventure.  (For those who object to the brothels and whatnot in Sovay, though, you'll probably want to give PotS a miss, though...)

*There's a full version here, though it should be mentioned that the lyrics I'm linking to are a bit different than the ones in the book.  There's another version here.  Google 'female highwayman lyrics' if you want more.