Published 1998
★★★★
Book 3, in which for the first time Annie doesn't fall back in time...Devonny goes forward. She's desperate to escape a marriage she doesn't want to a man she doesn't like—let alone love—but the 1990s are not what she expects: "I'd stay in one of your guest rooms," pleaded Devonny. "One of your extra maids could wait on me. You wouldn't even have to seat me at your dining table. The footman could serve me in my room."*
...or maybe the real world is just not Devonny expects, as a girl who has grown up in immense privilege and never stepped outside it.
My favourite thing about the book remains the way that Devonny, even as a heroine, remains...well, a product of her upbringing:
"Perfect," enthused Mrs. Lockwood. "Now, I take the seven-oh-two train, so I will set the alarm for five-thirty."
In the morning? Yes, servants and cooks and tenders of heating systems got up at such an hour, but people didn't! "That will be fine," said Devonny, uttering one of her hugest lies.*
Neither the book nor the series even tries to get into things like racism, which is probably just as well (I cannot imagine that Devonny would come off well), but I appreciate that there are realistic limits to just how far Devonny can grow in a short period of time.
As I noted with book 2, the obsession with Thin and disgust for fatness is strong here. I'll spare you the examples, but there's a fair amount of lingering on tiny waists (for good characters) and reminders of how gross fatness is (for bad characters). This is not a problem that ended in the 90s (1890s or 1990s), but I don't love how glaring it is to my 2020s eye.
Despite that, I've been trying to decide which of the books of the series is my favourite, and I'm just coming up...stumped. Might not recommend them today, but the nostalgia factor is strong.
*I'd include page numbers, but they're useless in the library ebook I read.
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