The Grand Tour, Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer
The Grand Tour is the sequel to Sorcery and Cecelia. I had to convince myself that these are entirely different characters in order to properly enjoy this novel. I didn't feel that the characters quite matched up with their previous versions, which could be explained by the long interval between novels. It was definitely not the interval between reading, which was about eight months.
Kate and Cecy are now married to the men they were involved with during the previous book. For their honeymoon, they are making the usual for this time grand tour of Europe, along with one of the young women's mother. Along the way, they stumble into a plot involving theft of royal symbols from all over the continent, with implications for the political stability of Europe.
The plot of the novel is serviceable, but the bits of undetailed backstory were more intriguing. I was more interested in finding out just exactly what Lady Sylvia did in her youth, for example, or what Kate and Cecy’s husbands were doing during the war. The actual plot also wasn’t as detailed as I would have liked. There was not enough about magic, and not enough about the main characters. I also ran into a problem that I have with a lot of alternate history: in a world with magic, like this one, why would Great Britain be having a war with a France led by Napoleon Bonaparte during the exact time period as it happened in the world we know? Then again, these two novels were not strictly alternate history, and should not be read as such.