Book Review: The Gentleman's Gambit
For those of us who read Evie Dunmore’s League of Extraordinary Women series and waited on baited breath for Catriona Campbell to finally find a love worthy of her remarkable mind, the wait is at last over. In The Gentleman’s Gambit, the quietest of our core four Suffragettes reveals her hidden depths, falls in love on her own terms, and shows she has a spirit every bit as adventurous as her best friends.
The story kicks off when Elias Khoury, a handsome new colleague of Catriona’s father, arrives ostensibly to catalogue Middle Eastern artifacts currently in possession of British academics. Catriona is tasked with playing guide for Elias, all while ignoring the inconvenient crush she’s developing, while Elias must also squash down his budding feelings for Catriona — especially since he’s actually come to England to repatriate the artifacts in question back home to the Middle East. It’s rare to find a book that really proclaims “fuck the British Museum” so wholeheartedly and consistently, and I am here for it.
Where Dunmore’s series has always thrived — besides the agonizingly delicious slow burns — is how realistic it all feels. The plot is richly steeped in history, heightening both the personal emotional stakes, as well as the larger ones for the world around our characters, and nowhere is it clearer than in The Gentleman’s Gambit. Elias is a foreigner, a Middle Eastern man who has adopted enough of the education and graces of English society that white men have no trouble referring to him as one of the “good ones” to his face, or indeed, simply remaining ignorant of his origins. Catriona is unmarried, and an academic, with no mother to teach her social graces, or any real fortune to fall back on (advantages afforded to the rest of her friends). She is also a neurodivergent woman in a time and place that didn’t really know what to do with a woman like that (not to say things are all that much better now) making things that much harder.
None of these hurdles are brushed aside, and there is no effort by the narrative to pretend that any of them are particularly easy for Catriona and Elias to overcome. But like the best sorts of romance, they are addressed, if not overcome, when the two of them work together, in mutual understanding and support. The romance aspect of The Gentleman’s Gambit is so sweet and tender, and so unique that this is easily my favorite of the series.
It’s also refreshing that Dunmore chose to include a plot point illustrating how the backwards mentality of the time did not just affect white women, but people of color as well. My only real regret is that we never had a woman of color’s point of view in the series (though never say never for a sequel series?). The English characters in the novel make no secret of how necessary they feel their involvement in the Middle East is, and show such a profound sense of entitlement over it. I wish I could say that any of the issues in the novel were things of the past, but alas, that’s not the world we live in. The book does end on a hopeful note however, one that speaks across the decades and centuries, promising that as long as there are those willing to fight for what is fair and what is right, there’s always going to be a silver lining, bleak as things may seem.
The Gentleman’s Gambit hits shelves December 5. Special thank you to Berkley and Netgalley for the advance copy for review purposes.