Review - "Confessions of the Fox"

Confessions of the Fox
by Jordy Rosenberg
rating: ☆☆☆ 1/2
published: 5th July 2018
spoilers? no

Goodreads

Galley provided by publisher

Confessions of the Fox is a reimagining of the legend of Jack Sheppard, a thief and gaol-breaker of the early 18th century in London, in which Jack is a trans man. It is told in the form of an authentic manuscript, found by Professor Voth, whose annotations of the manuscript in themselves tell a parallel story.

To be honest, I found it a little hard to get into the manuscript story. Mostly because it's written to emulate actual 18th-century writing and I find that hard to read in general, but also because, until about 65-70 pages to go, there's not much action really happening in it (defining action as adventure! explosions! risk of death! those kinds of things). On the other hand, I got really quickly into Professor Voth's story told in his footnotes. Which was kind of a problem, because that was a much more minor part of the book than the manuscript. But overall, the story was definitely good, just not really great until the last part (although there was a good bit in the middle which was absolutely Chaotic in both the manuscript and footnotes so).

Pretty central to Jack's story is his relationship with Bess, but I felt like I didn't get enough of a development of that in the manuscript. I realise it's not in first person so couldn't really give an insight into his feelings (although it's kind of an omniscient third person so did actually do insights from time to time - it also had multiple POVs/focuses which was a bit strange given that it was supposed to be Jack's confessions, and it's not really explained, but for a (potentially paranoid or obsessive) conjecture near the end, but anyway), but the relationship happens fairly rapidly. Like, we're told they mean a lot to each other but it doesn't always feel like there's a lot in the text to back that up. But that may have actually been a byproduct of the writing style. Who knows.

I have to confess, finally, that I was getting a little bored around the 70% mark, because it is a bit of a slow story - the real action comes in the last 20%, although the action in Voth's story is enough to keep you reading if just to know what happens next in that. It's also fairly ambiguous how Voth's story ends (or at least I found it to be) - is he just paranoid and obsessed with the manuscript, or is there really a mysterious group of people sitting outside of time?

And, to preempt anyone looking up Jack Sheppard and seeing his fate, this book does have a happy ending.