Part whimsy, part comic relief and part hard slog. A middle aged woman who lives out her historical romance novels in a fog of make believe and costume. I struggled with this. An interesting premise that didn’t work for me.

A Permitted Press ARC via NetGalley
(Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.)

Thank you NetGalley and Post Hill Press for the chance to read and review l The Seductive Lady Vanessa of Manhattanshire by Seth Kaufman.

Like good perfume, less is always more and that’s a lesson that the author really needs to learn.

The book is described as a comedic mashup of Don Quixote, Cold Comfort Farm, and The Thirteenth Tale. I’ve never read any of these books so all of this is a bit lost on me and I won’t talk about that. What I will be talking about is how there were 3 separate outlandish storylines in the book that became a bit too much when put together. In addition, the book could have been better written if the author (Seth) had added just some normalcy to the other characters.

When you read the book you know you’re in for a wild ride. The book is about a famous translator getting a copy of a book from an unknown author and tracking down who the author was, and often describing the book as a masterpiece. It turns out that the author was married to a billionaire and she and her whole family disappeared and are suspected to be dead. That’s the backdrop.

The main story is the story told in the book. It is about Maxine who has decided to call herself Lady Vanessa as she looks for love in Manhattanshire (New York). She gets her 19 year old cleaning lady to become her lady in waiting, convincing her by telling her that she’s going to help her find love.

Somewhere in the middle of the main story we also have chapters from the author of the book describing the state of her mind, as her billionaire separated husband threatens to kill her and her family as she leaves him. She’s leaving him because she’s discovered that he deals arms to countries so that they can fight their wars. He thinks its because she’s in love with someone from 25 years ago. The guy from 25 years ago sends her an email about how he’s still thinking about her, she replies, and then they start to sleep together again.

The thing is, Maxine has very clearly had a nervous breakdown or some form of a mental health crisis. She’s quit her job, put on some terrible makeup, and made a hoop skirt from who knows what and is calling herself Lady Vanessa. By the time her daughter arrives to help her, she’s basically harassing the plumber (and she absolutely makes the other guy really uncomfortable later in the book). Her daughter, with the help of two neighbors, throws out half of Maxine’s romance novel collection (which I consider so weird, like bro take your mom to a doctor instead), and instead of getting her mother to go to a therapist, goes away with very little insistence after a few weeks, after hiring a 19-year-old to come around for 4 hours a day and call her twice a week. Let’s also add that Maxine is living off her ex-husband's child support money, which should be going to her daughter!

Here’s my next problem. I get that while Maxine is being Lady Vanessa, she’ll talk like someone out of a regency romance novel. That’s no reason for every other character from the neighbors, to the woman who hit her with a painting (BASHED HER OVER THE HEAD WITH IT) and her fiancé to speak like her, which they end up doing. Then I’m also so weirded out by the old men who tried to pick her and the lady in waiting up; like bro's did no one notice anything odd about her? Even the nail place noticed she wasn’t well.

When you’re doing all this with one character, having the others act and sound different is important; otherwise, it turns from something amusing but sad to a bad book instead. Then adding all that in with who the real author is and her story, and the translator tracking her, it’s just too much of a mix. I also didn't need to be told that the book (story about Maxine) is such a masterpiece. That didn't work well for me.

I read this book without trying to look for any deep meaning hidden amongst Lady Vanessa's escapades. I just read and laughed at the silly antics the Lady finds herself in, taking pleasure in the absurd and accepting at face value. Doing that I found this well written, hilariously entertaining, with sharp, witty, if somewhat eccentric excerpts throughout.
Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for the free ARC, I am leaving my honest review in return.

The premise of this book is seductive, but I couldnt get beyond the feeling that the author was trying too hard to be clever. It felt like I was trapped in the corner of a cocktail party with an awkward guest telling awkward old jokes, one after another.

A light, comical novel would be a very welcome tonic and I desperately wanted to get a kick out of Lady Vanessa, but it wasn't happening for me.

Netgalley provided me a complimentary copy of this book in return for a candid r3view.

I loved the synopsis of this book but it felt a little flat for me.... The title and cover had me at hello and the book.started well but it ran out of steam and left me speed reading to get to the end

Wow! What a funny, clever, critical and sympathetic book about books. I loved the update on Don Quixote -- and the situations Lady Vanessa gets into often had me laughing out loud. The same goes for her fabulous sidekick Magdalena. But I also loved how the plot took so many fun and unexpected twists and turns. What starts out as a total comedy actually ends up being really dramatic, too. I thought it was a wonderful book. Highly recommended.

ARC eBook from Netgalley- all opinions are my own

The first chapter was funny... a contemporary woman, obsessed with Regency romance novels, transforms herself from Maxine into Lady Vanessa one day. But then the books gets stuck in a time-loop of redundancy because the story never seems to progress and the characters are not fully developed. Similar situations happen over and over again, and by the time you reach the (abrupt) ending... you feel like you've wasted your time.

This book was the perfect form of escapism and I loved the unquie premise. You can expect to be entertained by all of the colorful characters.

I absolutely could not get into this book at all. I found it disjointed and not funny at all when it was obviously trying so hard to be. Wouldn’t recommend this to anyone.

"Together they would be the talk of the kingdom"
"And yet dreams lack the linear, cartesian logic that I identify with a perfect story"
"A lady must always be a lady after all"
This book, this story, these characters and this author completely took me by surprise.
When I first started reading it, I was expecting everything but what I actually read.
In a combination between reality, fantasy, written and lived, this book plays with confusion and bewilderment just enough to keep the reader's interest, while also raising questions about life, love and perception...
Lady Vanessa 's life is just like that of every single person who sometimes feels suffocated by their own reality.
The story of the author themselves is the story of every single reader who's trying to escape in a different world, where our characters can do and feel everything we do, while trying to deal with our owns.
Of every writer who has a story to tell and doesn't know if it's gonna be heard.
"Am I good enough? Am I serving my character, my reader, myself? Will anyone possibly care about my work?"
After all, how many of us have even just once dreamed of being teleported into a Bridgerton reality, where the most important thing was wearing proper dresses and finding the right soul mate?
It is confusing yes, but I loved the changes of povs. I really liked the fact that, while one chapter we could follow one plot, the other someone else was at the centre of attention.
And the great references to classical colture, mentioning famous novels like Don Quixote ... loved those!
I really wished I could have read more about it all ... but I guess it's all work in progress!!
"Now I think I just loved that this desirable man desired me"
"I've started to think about something that should be news to no one: that love can be fatal"
"Was she crazy? Or just love crazy?"

The Seductive Lady Vanessa of Manhattanshire tells the story of Maxine More, an upper-class New Yorker who becomes so obsessed with romance novels that she decides to transform herself into a romance heroine—her alter ego, Lady Vanessa. This is described as a “misguided transformation” and the descriptions of Lady Vanessa are dripping with disdain: “The lipstick often wound up smeared on her teeth so that her smile resembled an unrepentant cannibal’s grin. The blush lent her face a clownish mien. And her dark zombie eyes were more alarming than alluring.”

Similarly, throughout the novel there is a sense of disdain for Lady Vanessa’s obsession with romance novels—it is clearly meant to be a kind of satire. In the best kind of satire, however, the joke is on the powerful, whereas this satire seems to be about older women who read romance novels—a demographic that is already mocked too frequently. And while there is a happy ending of sorts for Maxine/Lady Vanessa, it is only made possible when she sets aside her obsession, which is identified as a kind of addiction.

The book is framed as a novel that has been translated from Arabic, and throughout, the translator makes notes and comments on the plot, identifying the novel as a modernized Don Quixote, with Lady Vanessa playing Don Quixote. The Sancho Panza stand-in is a woman named Magdalena who the self-titled Lady Vanessa thinks of as her lady-in-waiting, but who was in fact hired by Emma, Lady Vanessa’s daughter, to take care of her mother. Magdalena constantly uses words such as “yo” and “dawg” in a way that seems to be intended to emphasize the difference between her background and Lady Vanessa’s—but to me, her dialogue felt pretty stilted and more a result of stereotyping than anything else. (Examples include “I’m all over that deal like beans on rice, yo,” and “We don’t mix no wine coolers into our champagne, know what I’m saying?”)

The fictional conceit that this is a manuscript translated from Arabic creates additional layers of plot, with both the narrator of the story and the translator contributing their own stories, including a mystery about the identity of the author. In addition to creating a lot of opportunities for the purported “translator” to talk about the plot of Maxine/Lady Vanessa as a “bewitching book,” there is also a fair amount of problematic material in the portrayal of the “author’s” cultural background as an Egyptian. I hesitate to outline every problematic portion of the book, but suffice it to say that the whole thing could really benefit from a sensitivity reader.