In a calendar year in which I’ve been able to finish reading very few books—so diminished is my mental capacity and so sapped is my emotional resilience by the stresses of the coronavirus pandemic—one book just knocked me off my feet and reminded me why reading novels is such an essential part of life. That book is Courtney Milan’s The Devil Comes Courting.
Milan’s previous book, The Duke Who Didn’t, was a New York Times notable book of 2020. It was an absolute delight—or, as reviewer Olivia Waite put it for the Times, “By turns consciously tender and fiercely witty, this is an unalloyed charmer.” These are very different books. Where The Duke Who Didn’t pours on the charm and wit, The Devil Comes Courting is about struggle and grief and trauma. But The Devil Comes Courting is the book I needed in 2021, in ways that are very much about this moment in time, and are also almost impossible to talk about because of the disdain with which so many people approach romance novels.
The problem here is that if I dwell too much on the things that The Devil Comes Courting does in addition to its central romance plot, the character development and side by side plots that ultimately bring the main characters together in the genre requirement described by the Romance Writers of America as “an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending,” too many people will hear that as a declaration of the inadequacy of every other romance novel. Because denigrating the genre that makes up 23% of the U.S. fiction market is a very popular pursuit, in large part because it’s dominated by women.
The Devil Comes Courting is the third book in Milan’s Worth Saga, and you will miss important things if you haven’t read at least the second book, After the Wedding. It’s the story of Captain Grayson Hunter and Mrs. Amelia Smith as the former attempts to lay the first transpacific telegraph cable and the latter works to invent a Chinese telegraphic code.
If you’re the type of person whose favored route to dismissing historical romance is that you once found a historical error in one, you might wish first to read Milan’s author’s note at the end, which goes into quite a lot of detail about the ways that she self-consciously changed the history to fit the story, whilst being entirely cognizant of it. This is an author’s note that touches on, and I am not kidding here, the second Opium War, the real first transpacific telegraph line, Japanese and Chinese telegraphic code, dinosaur emojis (which Milan proposed to the Unicode Technical Committee in 2016), gutta percha, telegraph cable production facilities, the history of segregated travel in the United States, late 19th-century Western accounts of travel into the interior of China, and a discussion kicked off by the sentence: “One of the things that I had to calibrate for this book was the question of how much racism to include.”
The answer is that there is quite a lot racism in the book, because both of the main characters’ lives have been profoundly shaped by it.
Grayson Hunter is Black, and a Civil War veteran, and the grandson of a duke, and a man consumed by the memory of the brothers he lost in the war he survived. Amelia Smith is Chinese, adopted by missionaries, expected always to swallow the casual racism of the people who are supposed to love and value her, never quite living up to her adoptive mother’s standards because she is not white and therefore cannot. And they are both driven to achieve amazing things while they wrestle with their ghosts and their traumas—the brothers he mourns, the birth mother whose return she always hoped for.
There is so much I can’t say about the book because spoilers, but I will say that this was the right book for 2021 precisely because it is about people living in pain in a broken, racist world filled with loss, and about how they go on anyway and get their happily ever after, a happily ever after possible because they have both fought through and done the things they needed to do. It was the right book for 2021 because emotionally it resonates with so many of the injustices we have been struggling through in recent years—to say nothing of the experience of surviving when so many people around you do not—but it does so not in a heavy-handed way always striving for resonance, but in ways that, again according to that author’s note, weren’t planned. They were conceived ahead of the events they now seem to echo.
Milan’s previous book, The Duke Who Didn’t, was a New York Times notable book of 2020. It was an absolute delight—or, as reviewer Olivia Waite put it for the Times, “By turns consciously tender and fiercely witty, this is an unalloyed charmer.” These are very different books. Where The Duke Who Didn’t pours on the charm and wit, The Devil Comes Courting is about struggle and grief and trauma. But The Devil Comes Courting is the book I needed in 2021, in ways that are very much about this moment in time, and are also almost impossible to talk about because of the disdain with which so many people approach romance novels.
The problem here is that if I dwell too much on the things that The Devil Comes Courting does in addition to its central romance plot, the character development and side by side plots that ultimately bring the main characters together in the genre requirement described by the Romance Writers of America as “an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending,” too many people will hear that as a declaration of the inadequacy of every other romance novel. Because denigrating the genre that makes up 23% of the U.S. fiction market is a very popular pursuit, in large part because it’s dominated by women.
The Devil Comes Courting is the third book in Milan’s Worth Saga, and you will miss important things if you haven’t read at least the second book, After the Wedding. It’s the story of Captain Grayson Hunter and Mrs. Amelia Smith as the former attempts to lay the first transpacific telegraph cable and the latter works to invent a Chinese telegraphic code.
If you’re the type of person whose favored route to dismissing historical romance is that you once found a historical error in one, you might wish first to read Milan’s author’s note at the end, which goes into quite a lot of detail about the ways that she self-consciously changed the history to fit the story, whilst being entirely cognizant of it. This is an author’s note that touches on, and I am not kidding here, the second Opium War, the real first transpacific telegraph line, Japanese and Chinese telegraphic code, dinosaur emojis (which Milan proposed to the Unicode Technical Committee in 2016), gutta percha, telegraph cable production facilities, the history of segregated travel in the United States, late 19th-century Western accounts of travel into the interior of China, and a discussion kicked off by the sentence: “One of the things that I had to calibrate for this book was the question of how much racism to include.”
The answer is that there is quite a lot racism in the book, because both of the main characters’ lives have been profoundly shaped by it.
Grayson Hunter is Black, and a Civil War veteran, and the grandson of a duke, and a man consumed by the memory of the brothers he lost in the war he survived. Amelia Smith is Chinese, adopted by missionaries, expected always to swallow the casual racism of the people who are supposed to love and value her, never quite living up to her adoptive mother’s standards because she is not white and therefore cannot. And they are both driven to achieve amazing things while they wrestle with their ghosts and their traumas—the brothers he mourns, the birth mother whose return she always hoped for.
There is so much I can’t say about the book because spoilers, but I will say that this was the right book for 2021 precisely because it is about people living in pain in a broken, racist world filled with loss, and about how they go on anyway and get their happily ever after, a happily ever after possible because they have both fought through and done the things they needed to do. It was the right book for 2021 because emotionally it resonates with so many of the injustices we have been struggling through in recent years—to say nothing of the experience of surviving when so many people around you do not—but it does so not in a heavy-handed way always striving for resonance, but in ways that, again according to that author’s note, weren’t planned. They were conceived ahead of the events they now seem to echo.