{"id":5091,"date":"2023-09-16T10:33:21","date_gmt":"2023-09-16T10:33:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/?p=5091"},"modified":"2023-09-16T10:33:21","modified_gmt":"2023-09-16T10:33:21","slug":"review-the-guinea-stamp-by-alice-chetwynd-ley-1961","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/2023\/09\/16\/review-the-guinea-stamp-by-alice-chetwynd-ley-1961\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Guinea Stamp by Alice Chetwynd Ley (1961)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"I\u2019ve enjoyed a number of Alice Chetwynd Ley\u2019s other books, but this one just didn\u2019t work for me. Too many concealed identities, too rushed a romance and a frankly unbelievable ending. Actually, the whole book is just one implausibility after another.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the premise: Joanna Feniton\u2019s parents are dead, so she lives with her grandparents, and at the story\u2019s opening, they are visiting Joanna\u2019s friend Kitty. Joanna is writing a letter one evening alone in a room, when she hears a suspicious noise outside. Instead of doing the sensible thing and ringing for a couple of hefty footmen to deal with the problem, she throws open the french doors and goes outside, where she meets a very suspicious man indeed. Again, instead of summoning help, she invites him into the house to hear his story. Then, when she discovers he is injured, and he tells her that he can\u2019t actually explain what he\u2019s doing, she calmly binds his injured arm, hides him when someone comes looking for her and then doesn\u2019t mention his presence after he\u2019s gone. She even gets up early to wash away the blood from the carpet. And all she knows of him is his (probably fake) name, Captain Jackson.<\/p>\n

Now, I\u2019m usually quite prepared to give any book its basic premise, however unlikely, but this one pushed me a little too far. I get that Joanna is intrepid and courageous, and all the rest of it, but there\u2019s a difference between intrepid and foolhardy, and she\u2019s frankly a little too much on the foolhardy side. There are several other occasions when she decides to do something herself instead of sensibly leaving it to those better able to tackle it, and gets herself into all sorts of hot water because of it. Combine that with her propensity to trust anyone with a glib story, or even no story at all, and she\u2019s getting perilously close to too stupid to live territory.<\/p>\n

Another big problem with this book is that there are far too many characters who have important roles but aren\u2019t given names, only numbers or the shadowy title \u2018my lord\u2019. Again, I get what the author is trying to do, and I suppose if I\u2019d been paying more attention (or had been taking notes, perhaps) I\u2019d have worked out everyone\u2019s identities eventually. As it was, I was left completely confused, and the last few chapters threw me completely. At one point, Captain Jackson is bopped on the head by the bad guys and held captive. Then he seems to have been arrested and imprisoned by the good guys. And then he\u2019s on a ship helping the good guys defeat the bad guys. Was this all the same Captain Jackson? Maybe I missed the connecting story that explained all these disparate sightings.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the big reveal of who Captain Jackson really is. All I can say about that is \u2014 no. Just no. I don\u2019t believe for one single minute that she could not know that, and no, telling us that she always met Jackson in poor light and therefore didn\u2019t recognise him elsewhere just doesn\u2019t cut it. So that\u2019s a huge fail.<\/p>\n

On the plus side, the writing is beautiful, as always with this author, and nothing struck me as inauthentic. There were some nice side characters. I especially liked Joanna\u2019s grandfather, who would have lived in his library if he could and was only half attending to anything else outside his books (a position with which I have total sympathy). The side romance between Kitty and her betrothed was well drawn, too, and the main romance had its share of good moments, although I\u2019m not keen on heroes who seize a kiss that wasn\u2019t actually on offer. The whole smuggling\/spying\/adventure plot left me cold but that\u2019s just me. I\u2019m not a fan of that, especially when it takes up so much space that the romance is effectively squeezed out. I did guess the identity of the villain, so there\u2019s that.<\/p>\n

Other books by this author worked really well for me, but this one was a pretty spectacular fail in the credibility department, and I didn\u2019t particularly take to either of the main characters. For anyone who enjoys this kind of spy story, however, it might work better. As it is, I can only give it two stars.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve enjoyed a number of Alice Chetwynd Ley\u2019s other books, but this one just didn\u2019t work for me. Too many concealed identities, too rushed a romance and a frankly unbelievable ending. Actually, the whole book is just one implausibility after another. Here\u2019s the premise: Joanna Feniton\u2019s parents are dead, so she lives with her grandparents, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[225],"class_list":["post-5091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-ley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5091"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5095,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5091\/revisions\/5095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marykingswood.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}