An Assassin’s Guide to Love and Treason
An Assassin’s Guide to Love and Treason
Virginia Boecker
384 pages
Little Brown Books, 2018
In the year 1601, Lady Katherine Arundell’s father is killed by the Queen’s men for being a secretly practicing Catholic. Katherine escapes and makes her way to London where she joins with some of her father’s contacts to get her revenge - by killing the Queen herself. She poses as a boy and manages to get a role in a brand new play by Shakespeare, set to be debuted for the Queen.
What Katherine doesn’t know is tat play is a ruse to root out an uprising against the Queen, and the person in charge of it is named Toby Ellis. Believing Katherine to be a boy named Kit, Toby has a role in the play opposite her. And as they spend time rehearsing together, they fall for each other. But when the truth comes out about “Kit’s” identity (first as a girl, then as the daughter of the dead Richard Arundell), things get wild and dangerous for these two.
This is a super fun romance with the intrigue and danger factors dialed up to eleven. Katherine and Toby couldn’t be more mismatched, except for the fact that their characters work so well together. Katherine is a girl dressed as a boy playing a girl in a play. Toby is a writer and a spy and a player (and bisexual to boot) who is distrustful of everyone. And they work.
The book is told in alternating points of view, a chapter for Toby followed by a chapter for Katherine/Kit. The character who plays best through both points of view is probably Shakespeare, who is hilariously written here as a sort of mad genius.