This is a decidedly odd book. It is dedicated to Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Ellen Kushner, all of whom may be said to have inspired it. Kushner’s contribution was through introducing Stevermer to something called “the Letter Game”:

I don’t know who invented the Letter Game (which I have heard called Persona Letters, or even Ghost Letters) but Ellen Kushner introduced it to me. I believe it originated as an acting exercise, one character writing a letter “in persona” to another.

The game has no rules, except that the players must never reveal their idea of the plot to one another. It helps to imply in the first letter why the two characters must write to each other and not meet in person.

Stevermer and Wrede set out to play such a game, writing letters back and forth in a light-hearted way, when they found it beginning to take over their lives. The story, set in an odd version of Regency England (hence Austen and Heyer) in which wizards and magicians are an established part of the social order, became so detailed that they eventually realized they had a novel on their hands. At that point they went back, cleaned things up, added plot devices here and there in the early letters so they’d be ready to hand when wanted, and like that. The result is both delightful and charming.

The novel takes the form of the correspondence between two young woman, Kate and Cecily, who are first cousins. Kate is in London with her awful Aunt Charlotte for her “coming out”; Cecily is dying to join her, but won’t be allowed to come out until the next year at least. There’s a mystery–who is the terrible old woman who tried to poison Kate at a meeting of the Royal College of Wizards?–and (naturally), a pair of mysterious young (single) gentlemen. Plus, there are a number of references and phrases (neck cloths, and the knotting thereof; the role of Beau Brummel as the arbiter of taste in dress; the notion of giving someone a “set down”) which I first saw in the Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman novels I reviewed a month or so ago, which I’d not noticed at all in Pride and Prejudice; I am forced to conclude that they are staples of the Regency Romance.

Anyway, it was good fun, I enjoyed it considerably; and as it happens there are two sequels. But more of them, anon.