Lucy has been tasked with visiting England with Helen, one of her design studio employer’s wealthy customers, just as her boyfriend, and Helen’s grandson, has broken up with her over Lucy’s habit of forging inscriptions in the antique books the studio sells. Lucy is unable to extricate herself from the trip when she learns that Helen is on a mission involving much more than procuring some silver place settings for her granddaughters, and that Helen’s past is tangled up with Lucy’s family history.
It took me a while to warm up to this book. Much like Kat Mackenzie’s “Work in Progress,” “The Brontë Plot” is equal parts travelogue and meandering story (though with fewer interesting side characters and comic set pieces). Lucy and Helen visit English literary sites, with stops in Bloomsbury, Westminster Abbey, the Yorkshire moors, and other highlights, and there’s a lot of quoting from the classics while pondering the genius of writers past. And while I’m certainly guilty of some literary tourism myself (I knew most of the stops on their itinerary, and I’ve been insufferable on vacations in Dublin, Barcelona, San Francisco, and elsewhere), a tour book doesn’t necessarily make for gripping reading/listening.
I came around, though, when the focus turned to Lucy’s struggles with her family history: her grandfather (and Helen’s long-ago lover) was a fence for stolen watches and other objects, and her father was a petty con-man and grifter, and Lucy is afraid that her tendency for confabulation is an inherited curse she’s unable to escape. There are several instances of Lucy using lies and subterfuge to get what she wants when a straightforward and honest approach might be just as successful, and she’s self-aware enough to know in the moment what she’s doing but is still unable to control the impulse.
There’s a lot of soul-searching, though the stakes are not especially high. The milieu is definitely one where wealth and privilege are taken for granted, and while there are risks for Lucy facing the consequences of her actions, it’s clear that the consequences won’t be especially dire. Still, Lucy is an interesting enough character that the story is worth sticking with.
This isn’t quite a romance, though it’s romance adjacent. Most of the focus is on Lucy’s personal development, with the boyfriend James feeling a bit like an afterthought. (The budding romance between Helen’s driver and the owner of the inn in Haworth, very much a subplot in this book, would make for a sweet little traditional romance story.)
