DOUBLE ENCHANTMENT

Author: Kathryne Kennedy ISBN: 9780505527639 9/2008 HISTORICAL Publisher: DORCHESTER
Time Period: Alternate 1848 Victorian England

Lady Jasmina was in a world of trouble. A simple spell had gone disastrously haywire and now there was a woman running around London who looked exactly like her—a woman with no sense of propriety whatsoever. All Society was whispering, and a baronet she’d never met was suddenly acting like he knew her…in a most intimate way. To find her twin and set things right, they’d have to work together—braving the fog-shrouded streets, a mysterious group called the Brotherhood, and a passion stronger than any magic.

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

DOUBLE ENCHANTMENT, the second book in the Relics of Merlin books by Kathryn Kennedy, is set roughly forty years before its predecessor, ENCHANTING THE LADY. This book actually serves to explain some of the societal differences between 'real' Victorian England and Kennedy's 'magical' Victorian England that weren't explained, in so many words, in the first book. The fact that titles passed to either gender as long as the heir had the magical ability to back it up, for instance, was mentioned in ENCHANTING, but never formally stated.

Lady Jasmina Karlyle, the heroine, is vastly different from Felicity of the first book as well. They are both sweet, clever and innocent, but where Felicity was content to be passive (until the end of the book), Jasmina did everything she could to forge her own path through her problems. Mostly with mixed results, but she tried at least.

Sir Sterling Thorn, the hero, spends much of the book in utter bewilderment. I honestly felt bad for him. He meets the woman of his dreams, spends an achingly beautiful night with her, marries her and then wakes up to find her gone. If that wasn't bad enough, it turns out the woman he was in love with wasn't real at all, technically, and the person who made her was as different as night is from day. The odd glimpses of Jaz he sees in Jasmina only serves to confuse him even more. Here is a girl who goes from a cold as stone Ice Princess one second, to a fiery, passionate courtesan the next, only to go back to the Ice Princess moments later!

The world feels real, as if I'm not reading a fantasy, but in fact a historical accounting of that time. Little details of life that many people feel would be so much easier if they had magic to perform the task are shown to be just as tedious and time-consuming. You can spell a broom to do your sweeping for you, but the energy required to do such a feat, however, might prove to be more tiring then the manual labor itself! Then also, magic seems to be such an ingrained facet of life that unicorns escorting a golden coach is as commonplace to these people as seeing a dog in a park for us.

I felt while reading the book, however, that it didn't grasp my attention quite as much as the first book. It didn't feel like a 'second' book to a connected series (though they can be read alone quite easily), but more like the first book. As mentioned previously, details that were talked about in the first book are actually explained in this book and I felt as if Jasmina and Sterling weren't as strong a couple as Felicity and Terence from ENCHANTING had been. Part of that could have been due to the fact that Terence was a were-lion, while Sterling is a were-stallion.

One mystery I remain puzzled about is Prince Albert. His age is never given (and I can't be certain that the author is following the 'real' Albert's age either), but he is a grown man in DOUBLE ENCHANTMENT (set in 1848) and in ENCHANTING THE LADY (set in 1882). I remember Felicity thinking that if Prince Albert knew her parents, that he must have been a child, but she wasn't above eighteen herself and her parents died young. It might be I am looking too deeply into this, however.

The series is turning out to be a delightful surprise to me and I look forward to the next book!

Alexandra Cenni