Black Hearts in Battersea... hmmmm

 So I pick up things at random whenever I go to the library. Mysteries, audio books, biographies, math textbooks (last time I picked up The Writer's Market and tried to check it out. *Reference section only* Oops). And some times, I find a good one. Well, last week I was feeling British, historical, and oceanic, so when I saw Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken, I thought "OH GOODY, a sea mystery." (I often take things literally.) At first I read the description and thought it was an adventure novel along the lines of King of the Wind, but when I got hope it turned at to be a mystery. A fantasy mystery. But not THAT kind of fantasy, I was pleased to find out.

 It turns out, even after the Inklings ruled the world, there were actually fantasy novels that were not about alternate universes, but alternate history. Pretty interesting.

 Long ago in England, there was some kind of war between people of a political persuasion called 'Hanoverians' and those for King James III. Who the heck they are, would take a search engine and an encyclopedia to find out, to be sure. Anyways, I guess the Hanoverians won, but Aikens was not exactly one to write things the way they ended up originally, so in her "Wolves of Willoughby Chase Chronicles" the sovereign over England is King James the III. Thus it is classified a historical fantasy. Though I think some of it had to do with a 8-person hot air balloon. ;-P

 A reviewer on Goodreads pretty much sums it up:

A humorously convoluted Victorian melodrama, complete with plots, assassination attempts, kidnappings, shipwrecks, hidden identities, secret societies, and hot-air balloon escapes.

 This book was quite interesting and had a remarkably good style; however, many overtly convenient plot twists kept this from being a favorite. The beginning was extraordinarily fun and mysterious, as was the middle, but the ending had too many obvious outs. You can tell it is a series because of the references to Willoughby Chase as well as the loose ends that are left at the end. To be honest though, I liked the loose ends and thought that a book standing by itself would be very intriguing with them.