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    The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl
    The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl
    The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl
    Audiobook15 hours

    The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl

    Written by Theodora Goss

    Narrated by Kate Reading

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Mary Jekyll and the Athena Club foil a plot to unseat the Queen and race to save one of their own in this electrifying conclusion to the Locus Award winning trilogy that began with The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter.

    Life’s always an adventure for the Athena Club...especially when one of their own has been kidnapped! After their thrilling European escapades rescuing Lucina van Helsing, Mary Jekyll, and her friends return home to discover that their friend and kitchen maid Alice has vanished—and so has their friend and employer Sherlock Holmes!

    As they race to find Alice and bring her home safely, they discover that Alice and Sherlock’s kidnapping are only one small part of a plot that threatens Queen Victoria, and the very future of the British Empire. Can Mary, Diana, Beatrice, Catherine, and Justine save their friends—and the Empire?

    In the final volume of the trilogy that Publishers Weekly called “a tour de force of reclaiming the narrative, executed with impressive wit and insight” in a starred review, the women of the Athena Club will embrace their monstrous pasts to create their own destinies.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateOct 1, 2019
    ISBN9781508280316
    Author

    Theodora Goss

    Theodora Goss is the World Fantasy Award–winning author of many publications, including the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting; Interfictions, a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland, a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; The Thorn and the Blossom, a novella in a two-sided accordion format; and the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia; and the novels, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, and The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and her work has been translated into eleven languages. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program. Visit her at TheodoraGoss.com.

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    Reviews for The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl

    4.5/5

    266 ratings19 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Loved the entire trilogy, and will be reading more of the author's work. The sense of humor was delightful throughout.
    • 3/5
      Like the rest in the trilogy, it is a fun and interesting take on the stories we know and with which we are familiar.
      I do like the twist it applies to it.
      This particular installment deepens on the relationship between the members of the Athena club and also explores their relationships as friends, sisters, mothers, care givers.
      I liked this series and totally recommend it.
    • 3/5
      For some reason, all the things I found charming and delightful about the first two books -- the asides as the book is written, the multiplicity of characters, made this one a very hard book to get into. I even tried audio version (it was worse). I felt that the sheer number of the asides made it almost impossible for the plot to even get started, and the points of view of characters scattered across Europe dragged it down as well. When I finally got into it, I enjoyed it, but I think I'm done with the Athena club, unless they start to have shorter and more fast paced adventures.

      Advanced reader's copy provided by Edelweiss ** so editing may have taken place!
    • 5/5
      These books were very entertaining, and personally I loved the conversation style (:
    • 5/5
      I was highly entertained and especially loved the inclusion of so many literary characters.
    • 5/5
      All three books were excellent. Hoping for a number 4.
    • 3/5
      This is the third book in the Adventure of the Athena Club series and, I am led to believe, the final book, although nothing about all three novels struck me as “trilogy” and I would be happy for the series to continue. Like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen above, Goss has repurposed well-known fictional characters from Victorian and Edwardian literature, but to a different purpose. First and foremost, her story is female-led and female-driven. She has had to invent characters in order for this to be the case. Such as Dr Jekyll’s daughter Mary, the leader of the Athena Club; or Catherine Moreau, the puma woman from the HG Wells novel. This is not a weakness but a strength. Like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, these books are not entirely straightforward, and are framed as penny dreadfuls, explicitly written by Moreau, of the Athena Club’s adventures, in much the same way as the Sherlock Holmes stories were framed as the diary of Dr Watson. Although the books’ definition of penny dreadfuls seems to owe more to the anonymous female-authored books of Regency circulating libraries than it does actual Victorian pulp fiction. Not that the interpolations by the cast, which is all nicely meta, fit either. I’m a big fan of breaking the fourth wall, even if it’s fictionally. Having said all that… I don’t like the titles of these novels, but I love the stories they tell. This one has the Order of the Golden Dawn attempting to turn Britain into, well, pretty much what Johnson’s government has sort of been working toward. It plans to replace Queen Victoria with a compliant clone, and Queen Victoria was far more revered in the late nineteenth century than Queen Elizabeth II is now, and then turn Britain into an “England for Englishman”. Happily, this is derailed pretty quickly – not by the Athena Club, but by the female members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, who had their own plan: resurrect Tera, High Priestess of Isis, who died 5,000 years ago and was mummified, and she will take over the British Empire and remake it according to her desires. While those desires include such un-Victorian things as female emancipation and gender equality, the Athena Club oppose it on principle (no tyranny is ever benevolent, no matter how well-intentioned). The title refers to Tera’s power, which is considerably more than mere hypnotism, although the actual “mesmerizing girl” is the Athena Club’s maid, Alice, who has the same power, albeit a great deal weaker, and whose disappearance kickstarts the plot. I do like the series’s use of its characters – Van Helsing is a villain, Count Dracula is not, Ayesha is head of the Alchemist’s Society – and if there’s some occasional padding, and the plots don’t always quite fit together, never mind, they’re an interesting, and much-needed, take on the literature they pastiche.
    • 5/5
      Loved this book. Great character development and not at all what i thought the series was going to be about.
    • 5/5
      Loved this series. There are several short sections throughout the book that the audio cuts out for short periods of time which was aggravating, but was never for so long that you missed what was happening.
    • 5/5
      I love the series, it's a lot of fun. I hope there is more.
    • 5/5
      Love all three books and very nice author! Read the books awesome!
    • 5/5
      It's nice to read about women that don't have to rely on men, don't constantly trip on their own two feet and sprain an ankle, don't cry non stop, and actually kick some ass.
      I really hope there will be a book 4!!
    • 3/5
      I really enjoy this series. It's fairly light, full of found family tropes, and blends mystery with historical fantasy in a very satisfying way. It took me ages to finish this because the audiobook kept returning itself and then I had to wait on hold again, but 10/10 for the wonderful reader.
    • 5/5
      Love this series!! I'm scared it's going in a weird turn, but the Athena Club is the most outrageous group of ladies, and daring, that I love to hear about their adventures. Diana RULZ!
    • 5/5
      The 3 books were excellent!! It was the best book series I've found in a while. I wholeheartedly recommend listening to them or reading them!!!
    • 4/5
      The Athena Club return to London from one extraordinary adventure and are plunged into another. Their teenaged kitchen maid Alice has been kidnapped, Sherlock Holmes is missing and there is a plot afoot to impersonate the queen.This story has adventure, teamwork, mystery, unexpected twists, more cameos by characters from popular Victorian fiction, and commentary on late Victorian concerns (like empire and eugenics). I particularly liked seeing Alice become a central part of the story, and her complicated relationship with her newly-discovered mother.But my favourite part was not the adventures of the Athena Club but how they tell them -- their interactions when they interrupt the narrative to discuss their lives together, to highlight what they think is important or to argue about what Catherine has chosen to include in the narrative. Their voices often are present, even in the middle of a scene that isn’t about them, and I like what these interruptions reveal: a team, a household, a family. BEATRICE: They are the clothing of the New Woman. They are meant not to be feminine, but practical. CATHERINE: On women they look like men’s clothing, on men they look like women’s clothing. That’s where the New Woman meets the Dandy. BEATRICE: Why is it necessary to categorize people in that fashion? Why can we not all wear whatever we wish, whatever is useful and aesthetically pleasing? I believe that someday we shall all wear garments that are light and of a pleasing texture, easy to put on and take off. At the same time, they will express the aspirations of the spirit. They will be like the garments of the Greeks, both graceful and functional. Why can we not dress in such a fashion now? MRS. POOLE: Because this is England, and you would all catch your deaths of cold.
    • 5/5
      This is the 3rd book on Goss's Athena Club series. If you enjoy classic literature, I think you'll enjoy this series as much as I have.
    • 5/5
      I hope there will be another book, or at the very least I hope the author plans to write the other books that Catherine talks about writing in the story. I need more of these stories and I love that they pull in other characters from classical literature and history. It makes the characters of this book feel more real because I feel like I already know their parents or their friends from the things I have grown up reading. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes fantasy, magical realism, historical fiction, mysteries, and maybe even paranormal stories.
    • 4/5
      This whole series is fun and entertaining! I really wish the author was continuing on with more books as I love reading about these adventures.