Book Review: Maude Horton’s Glorious Revenge by Lizzie Pook

Maude Horton and her beloved grandfather were stunned but not, perhaps, surprised when her sister Constance left them a message stating that she’d run away to sea. Twenty year-old Constance had disguised herself as a boy and found a berth on a ship sailing north in search of Sir John Franklin, the famed Arctic explorer who’d recently gone missing. While Maude and her grandfather were content to run their London pharmacy, Constance had long sought out adventure: this audacious act was merely the culmination of her youthful ambitions.

When Maude learns that the HMS Makepeace is finally returning after its fruitless two-year search, she makes every preparation to greet both the ship and her wayward sister. So she’s devastated to be informed that Jack Aldridge, as her sister had been known, had perished in the icy north. Infuriatingly, the only thing that anyone will tell her is that Constance died by “misadventure”. Wanting answers, Maude crashes the admiralty boardroom, demanding particulars. While she’s quickly shooed away, she does find one sympathetic ear.

An admiralty clerk, Francis Heart, smuggles Constance’s diary out to her. He has his own concerns regarding what happened aboard the Makepeace, but is still at a loss as to what to do about it. Maude soon discovers that one man was indeed responsible for Constance’s death, and that his involvement in it has been covered up. Unwilling to let him get away with murder, Maude embarks on an audacious plan for vengeance, fueled by her grief and undying love for her younger sister:

With Constance gone, Maude had lost the very centre of her earth. How cruel that such a thing exists. How cruel that it can be taken from her, just like that.

 

She had always felt a responsibility, had welcomed the responsibility, to care for Constance. She had placed Constance first, concerned herself only with Constance, prioritized Constance. To the detriment of herself, but she did not care. She could not exist if her sister did not exist, she was sure of that. After her parents died, caring was what she did. What did she have to offer anyone if not that?

With her former purpose in life ripped away from her, Maude now has only thoughts of revenge to keep her going. But what can one young woman do when faced with the entire political might of the British admiralty? Maude has never considered herself particularly quick-witted or brave—those were attributes she left to Constance—so must dive deep into her own psyche to find as yet unknown reserves of strength to help her see her plans through. Along the way, she’ll discover unexpected but invaluable allies, even as her quest plunges her headlong into mortal peril.

Lizzie Pook knows how to write a rollicking historical adventure, as both Maude and Constance navigate unfamiliar territory in mid-1800s England and beyond. Maude’s England is swept up in a murder craze, with public hangings considered popular entertainment and Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum one of the capital’s major draws, especially with the opening of the death-themed Separate Room. Ms. Pook’s consideration of both crime and the morality of punishment adds yet another thoughtful layer to this already terrific tale.

But it was Constance’s diary entries of the wonders of the Arctic that really transported me, as the young woman expertly captures the majesty of the wilderness her heart has so long been seeking:

The whole landscape is alive! The bergs threaded with veins just like those you’ll find in a living, breathing body. The skies are filled with life too: puffins, fulmars, eiders, snow geese and gulls abound. There are whales now and then. Bowheads, the occasional pod of killers, barreling past the ship with dorsal fins rising taller than any man on the Makepeace. When the larger whales are sighted, breaking the waters with open mouths full of baleen, they mist the air with their breath, as if the ocean itself is exhaling.

The events of Maude Horton’s Glorious Revenge cover and cross great physical distances even as its characters explore the strange and perilous terrain of the human condition. Maude’s self-imposed cloistered lifestyle is exploded by her sister’s death, and her gradual flowering into confidence as well as her courage in finally embracing a life spent not merely inside her family pharmacy make her a protagonist you’ll be rooting for from the first page to the last.