2024/068: Derring-Do For Beginners — Victoria Goddard

What matter if this was the end of her respectability? She’d never wanted that, had she? She’d wanted friends, and adventures, and to see what lay on the other side of the horizon, the Empire, the mountains. [ch. 27]

First in a trilogy, The Red Company, set in Victoria Goddard's increasingly complex Nine Worlds universe: chronologically, the events of Derring-Do for Beginners take place more or less at the same time as 'The Tower at the Edge of the World' (a shorter story, which I have read but not reviewed).

Jullanar Thistlethwaite is an unexceptional young woman of genteel family, who just about scrapes into university (an unfortunate occurence during the final exams) and wins a place at the remote University of Galderon. After a long and tedious journey she discovers that the University is 'closed for the year', having made itself invisible: she's swept up by a fellow would-be student, and somehow, simply without saying anything to the contrary, finds herself outside the Empire of Astandalas, in the city of Ixsaa where her aunt Maude is conducting sociological studies. Jullanar doesn't speak the local language, so Maude arranges for a friend's son to tutor her. (Maude's friends, Kasiar and and Cadia, are delightful middle-aged ladies, unmarried businesswomen in what Jullanar instantly classifies as 'a man's city'. I would read a novel about these women.)

Kasiar's son is Damian Raskae, a brilliant swordsman who is generally regarded as stupid and sulky -- though he's extremely good at preventing fights, and at roaming the city's hinterland marshes. He is astonishingly goodlooking, and everyone fears that Jullanar, with her love of romantic novels, will fall for him: but instead they become friends. And one day a young man falls out of the sky into their rowing-boat, wittering about never having had a shadow before, and introducing himself only as 'Fitzroy' ...

Every time I read one of Goddard's novels I rekindle my craving for more of her writing. That said, her books (or rather series) are tonally very different: this is (literally) worlds away from the courteous bureaucracy of The Hands of the Emperor, or the mannered Gothic of the Greenwing and Dart books. The stakes here are reassuringly low; Jullanar and Damian are both social misfits, and they find friendship and adventure in each other's company. The setting is richly visualised, the secondary characters ditto, and Jullanar and Damian have flaws and fears and fancies -- just like ordinary folk.

I am so looking forward to the next in the series...

"...I say, Jullanar, do you think that’s what happened to my shadow? The blood from that serpent spattered all over me—and then I found the rooster—and here’s my shadow!”
Jullanar said, with relief, “And here’s the boat.”