Blood and Circuses (Phryne Fisher Series #6) Book

By FAR the worst Phryne Fisher I've read so far, and one I almost didn't make it through.

Phryne goes undercover in the circus to help some people she didn't really want to help, because she'd slept with one of them once. She immediately gets massive doubts about how she'll be able to cope without her creature comforts, including Dot to help her get dressed and her own bathroom and cook. Interesting considering how often she rubs in people's faces that she was born poor and grew up without any creature comforts at all...

Once she gets to the circus she sheds her old self and becomes Fern, the little sprite who used to do gymnastics and wants to learn to stand up on a horse. She learns that life is hard when you can't put 'The Honourable' before your name, that people are mean to her, and that when she can't be allowed to express the full extent of her just unbelievably individual and unique and beautiful personality (read: buy expensive things and have a bath every day), she feels like she is losing herself and nearly has a breakdown. Several times.

For me, the premise of this book was a terrible mistake on Greenwood's part. To take Phryne away from her nice clothes, her pretty house, her excellent cook and butler and maid and Commie friends, only to have her whine constantly about how those things make her who she is and how she is losing herself because she has to spend a week or so undercover earning her way, only shows the reader how Phryne is a romantic construction, no more than the sum of her parts. Without the descriptions of beautiful clothes, glittering parties, things that scream 1928, she is nothing at all. While she could have been given a new aspect in this scenario, all we are subjected to is endless pathetic whinging, to which I imagine most readers without a Lord for a father and rather a lot of money are extraordinarily unsympathetic. I certainly was.

I don't remember the plot. It was convoluted, boring and completely overshadowed by our one-dimensional heroine. Oh, there was a lesbian encounter (a new one for Phryne) and a hermaphrodite.

Also, the ending, where Phryne is nearly raped and instead left to die in a lion cage, read almost like a bit of pornographic fiction. And then, when she was finally (thank God!) revealed to be the Hon. Phryne Fisher and bathed in asses' milk and honey or what have you, and left to sleep the sleep of the just and right and rich, the two men she has slept with in this one both sleep next to her, in a bizarre I-don't-know-you-but-we've-both-slept-with-her-and-she-needs-us-right-now set up. Because she just really needed some male attention after only having one sexually satisfying and femininity-reinforcing encounter in the last two weeks.

I really, really disliked this book and everything Greenwood said about her character in it.

EDIT: Here to report in the year of our lord twenty sixteen that this was indeed the book that put me off Phryne permanently. I kept my (I think complete?) set of books gathered from secondhand shops and op shops and booksales for a while longer, but every time I thought about reading the next one I remembered this GODAWFUL book and chose something else. So eventually I admitted that I was never going to be interested in picking her up again, and sold them all. I felt so free! ALSO the tv series is PURE GARBAGE and I hated it more than I hated this book, which is saying something.