The Square of Sevens - Review
Do you ever feel like you’ve read all the good books? You’re standing in the bookstore and looking around and everything feels like a fast fashion version of a story you’ve read 300 times. You read a comment that says: “does it have spice?” on a post recommending a book about a family in war-torn Europe in the 1940s. All the covers start looking the same and I can’t remember what is what. I feel like this a lot. I’ve fallen prey to a lot of bad books. I’ve written at length making fun of them. But good books are still around, you just have to dig.
And by digging I mean going through my camera roll to find months old no-context screenshots of books that looked interesting to me in passing and then got buried in memes and selfies and pictures of my cats. I found this book in just such a way. A Goodreads screenshot from a year ago. Thank you to my husband for making me pay the 99 cents to have extra storage for occasions such as this.
Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s The Square of Sevens, however I found out about it, found me when I most needed it, in a reading slump and rather way below my usual mental health state—which is, latent misery and feelings of impending doom, but still going about my day. A historical fiction novel, it follows Red, an orphaned fortune-teller raised up as a lady in Bath society. Bent on finding the truth about her mother, she gets quickly swept up in a dangerous game of lawsuits, family secrets, and a battle for inheritance. Was her father who he said he was? Is she? Thrust into the richest families in England, Red takes the reader through mystery after mystery. It might not sound groundbreaking or anything, but I know I screenshotted this for a reason.
It’s very cleverly plotted, and ekes out just enough information to keep the reader desperate. But my god can it be slow. Red is not a compelling enough character in her own right to warrant the tediousness in which we have to sit through to get to the juicy bits. Her motivations are very slim, and her personality outside of that is almost non-existent. Although, to go a little meta, perhaps that was her intention after all? Because *SPOILER ALERT* the book we are reading is her memoir from her perspective, used to prove her own case. So of course it’s told exactly the way she wants it, in her full control. I guess I’m okay with that. Consider my disbelief suspended.
Too many times, I found myself practically shouting into the void: “Who?!” There are too many names and relationships to keep track of, and for little to no pay-off until after the first half concludes. How many De Lacy’s are there? They’re related to who, how? In my view, I’d have hung on to all that info quicker if I was getting rewarded for it. A few of the smaller bits of revelation had no impact on me as I read them because I needed a second to remember who was who. *SPOILER* Keep your ears open when they’re discussing the legal jargon of the codicil, because when I finished it, I asked myself what it was all for, why not just tell the truth? But there’s one operative phrase, being “legally begotten”
The mystery itself is enchanting. In her author’s note, Shepherd-Robinson says she wanted to
‘something mythical and magical, a sweeping Dickensian story with a twist’, which she achieves, without feeling derivative or copy and pasted. The background of English aristocracy and high society is well fleshed-out, without leaning too heavily on it for atmosphere with no real personality– as can be a problem with novels that go in self-defining as something as evocative as Dickensian. Another common offender is “dark academia,” if you get me. The story would benefit from being more tightly woven, but the mystery is propulsive and interesting. You trust Red and you don’t, you guess at the “plot twist” and you’re wrong. Wrong again. The final reveal is fantastic and well worth the wait.
Most of the characters are morally gray on the kind end, and downright evil on the far end, leaving you at war with yourself wondering who you should root for, and who you should not feel that bad for. Whiplash is a given, I changed sides, and once had to smack myself out of feeling sympathy for someone undeserving.
I quite enjoyed how the Square of Sevens method was used. Each chapter begins with card pull and a quick summation of what the card means, which gives some hint as to the chapter’s contents. Red uses the rare method of fortune telling to infiltrate not only Bath, but the London fairground scene and the De Lacy family itself. Her role as fortune-teller grants her a kind of privilege with her querist, allowing information to spill forth without the querist feeling like they’ve revealed anything. It’s a rather clever position to have a schemer take. And although it’s about a fortune-teller, and it is repeatedly proven to be a method that correctly reveals past, present, and future, the novel keeps its feet firmly planted in reality.
On a final note, what they did with that bird was fucked up.
3.5/5