Review of Queen of Lombard Street by Lisa Kleypas

I adored the Upstairs, Downstairs, Downton Abbey-style peek at the unlikely cast of robust characters (here, former convicts) working in the Victorian household of a groundbreakingly independent woman, a financial genius overcoming societal limitations in order to allow other women's freedoms. The minor mystery and some of the romance elements didn't resonate as strongly with me as other aspects, but the novel is highly entertaining and lovely.

No one ever really expected happiness in this life. Rich or poor, hardly no one got what they wanted. You had to be content with your lot, whatever it was. Be grateful for small blessings. Know it could all disappear in an instant.

As the illegitimate daughter of a fierce, Spanish-born mother, Reina Martin understands the importance of having control over your own life. But Victorian society refuses women's voices and choices at every turn.

Reina is unsurprised but furious when she has difficulty convincing a bank manager to allow her to open a sizeable account without a man's signature. But the young economist takes her relentless demands for independence and reshaping women's freedoms much farther--she becomes determined to establish England's first women's bank, with her help of her happenstance, dedicated mentor William Farlow.

With her savvy instincts and investments, Reina grows her fortune, finally buying a formerly grand, dilapidated home she has long admired, Westbrook House, from which she writes and feverishly works. Her longtime friend (who is now a culinary student) June joins her and mans the kitchen, and Reina fills out other necessary roles in the home with a colorful cast of recently paroled workers--much to June's chagrin.

When Reina realizes that the household of new additions that she relies on, one that is shaping up to be a ragtag makeshift family of sorts, includes an undercover investigator looking into her trusted friend Farlow, she feels betrayed. And she is now faced with impossible decisions around loyalty, morality, and her own ambitious goals for those who desperately need a boost.

“After seeing how the law goes in favor of the ones with the most financial resources, I wanted to find out why they were always men. After thorough research of English law, I discovered the answer: Approximately ninety percent of all the laws that mention women have been designed to keep wealth out of female hands.”

Much of the novel focuses, delightfully, on an Upstairs, Downstairs-type of peek inside a mansion's workings and its colorful cast of workers. The characters who seem potentially murderous or duplicitious develop unshakable loyalty to Reina and find roles that, if not exactly what they're hired for, suit them beautifully. The transformations of members of the staff--as well as for Reina in their midst--are striking, often funny, and heartwarming. The character of Mad Dog was a particular gem.

The plot running beneath the novel's focus on breaking Victorian rules of rigidity centers around finance and burgeoning feminism.

But Kleypas has primarily published romance novels, and while two budding, societally forbidden romances threaten to bloom throughout this story (I loved the simmering promise in both cases), they become a real focus (somewhat abruptly for me) toward the end of the book, when much of the focus falls on their culmination in relationships. I enjoyed the building of the love that emerges throughout Queen of Lombard Street. But in light of the rich building blocks of characters, roles, growth, banter, and platonic love among the household Kleypas has carefully wrought to that point, as well as the broader Victorian implications in all areas for convicted persons, women, and class, I found the focus and page time spent on detailed sex scenes here jarring; they irritably removed me from the wide-ranging magic that was shaped beforehand for the full cast of characters.

The sleuthing involved in the financial aspect of the plot and uncovering of the truth requires a significant suspension of disbelief regarding amateur involvement, coincidences, guesses, access, and escape. This felt like an added-on set of scenes needed to advance this part of the plot.

Ultimately I wanted to spend all of my Queen of Lombard Street reading time immersed in Kleypas's Westbrook House world, witnessing the outrageous and hilarious, poignant and touching, and heartbreaking and heartwarming developments among the rich, memorable characters that the author placed under one fictional Victorian roof.

Some of the novel's characters are based upon real-life figures such as Mary Paley Marshall, Britain’s first female economist, the financial giant Hetty Green, and Florence Nightingale. (Side question: Did you know that Nightingale was "a groundbreaking statistician who used charts and graphs to help the public understand complex data about health and hygiene"? I didn't!)

I received a prepublication edition of this novel courtesy of NetGalley and Avon and Harper Voyager, and I received an audiobook version (narrated by Mary Jane Wells and Joe Jameson) courtesy of Libro.fm and Avon.

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Lisa Kleypas is the author of 50 contemporary and historical romance novels.

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