The Last Legacy by Adrienne Young
(Titan Books, 2022)
Reviewed by Anne F. Wilson
The story starts with our heroine, Bryn Roth, arriving by ship to the Bastian city docks. After the death of her parents fourteen years ago, Bryn has been brought up abroad by her great aunt who has taught her to be ladylike. Now Bryn is eighteen she has been summoned home by her controlling Uncle Henrik to meet the rest of her family, and find her place in it.
The Roth family business is jewellery, or rather, fake gemstones. They also indulge in piracy. They occupy an unfashionable house in a downmarket district. The household is disproportionately male, including, apart from one self-effacing aunt and a female housekeeper, Bryn’s male cousins, her uncles, and a number of craftsmen. Henrik’s ambitions involve using Bryn, who is ladylike and marriageable, to help him join the merchants’ guild, and take a step up the socio-economic ladder.
Bryn’s role is clearly as a pawn, but can she achieve some autonomy for herself, particularly in whom she is to marry? It’s probably no surprise to find that she can.
What did I like about this book? It’s clearly a young adult book, aimed at a particular market. The story was gripping and proceeded eventfully. Girls of the merchant class are not just pawns in the marriage market and can develop their own business ventures. Bryn is steadfast in her determination to decide her own future including earning her own living and choosing the man she is to marry. The prose is workmanlike but drags you straight into the story.
And yet, and yet. Everybody seems to be white, which in a port city is a bit odd. There is a lack of other diversity as well. Bryn rejects her uncle’s choice of husband, but there’s no hint that (apart from falling in love with a different man) she has any other choices. All potential relationships are presented as one man plus one woman. Bryn has no female friends, either within the household or outside. Clearly girls need role models who can determine their own futures and achieve success in their undertakings, but there seemed to be a lot of unspoken assumptions in the book that made me feel uncomfortable.
The story is hermetic. We find out nothing about the wider society either within Bastian or outside it. All we have is merchants and craftsmen. In particular there seem to be no religious or philosophical systems by which anybody lives, and, fortunately for the Roths, no visible law enforcement.
I found the mechanics of the plot a little too pat. Bryn wants to earn a place in her family, but doesn’t want to marry the son of Simon, whose patronage Henrik is seeking. She finds a disused teahouse that had belonged to her mother, starts it operating and uses it to win friends and influence people. Her nice manners, sound business sense and exquisite taste are all assets here.
Everything’s very straightforward, one might say simplistic. Simon has a secret ledger that Bryn finds and reads on Henrik’s orders. The names in it aren’t even encrypted. She then deceives Henrik about what she has discovered, on the off chance that it may come in handy one day. (Reader, it does.)
Bryn is telling the story in the past, but there is no distance between the author and her character, no reflections on whether her actions are right or wrong. She doesn’t appear to have any problem with the Roths’ illegal practices—these are purely a social handicap. There’s no ambiguity, no spaces in the plot for other possible outcomes to leak in. Does this matter? Well, what we have is a love story and an adventure story, and of course there is always room for stories where a girl finds herself and makes her own destiny. Is it anything else? Is this going to be a book that anyone other than its intended audience will read and remember? I don’t think so.
Review from BSFA Review 18 - Download your copy here.