A Quick Note On This Review: This article includes affiliate links to Bookshop.org as a way of supporting both local bookshops and my own ability to write.
Red, who’s accustomed to living on the road with her cunning-man father, is forced to adapt when her father dies and she is left in the care of a scholarly gentleman from Bath. Raised as a lady with the backdrop of Georgian Bath society, Red uses her skill as a fortune teller who relies on the mysterious Square of Sevens card technique to uncover the secrets surrounding her past in order to forge a brighter future for herself.
The Square of Sevens by Laura Shephard-Robinson is a historical novel with a focus on the mystery of Red’s parentage. The focus of the story centers on Red’s trajectory from an orphan child to a fortune teller for the wealthy, but at the core of the novel is a question of what it means to have a name when the economic and social structures around a person are exclusionary. Red’s father was forced to wander with his daughter and attempted to pull together a living from the remains of a carnival act, but even as a charge of Mr. Robert Antrobus, a traveler Red and her father come across, and later a renowned fortune teller, Red isn’t able to achieve the kind of stability and security that she’s sought since her father passed away. This is what drives her to seek out the family of her mother, who her father believes would put her in danger, and the resulting conflict shows how what’s believable and what’s provable are sometimes at odds with one another.
While The Square of Sevens was an enjoyable novel, it’s complicated and offers a number of twists that can make it hard to enjoy fully on an initial read-through. There’s also a plot twist that adds to the commentary that Shephard-Robinson was likely making about the role that social structures force individuals to make desperate choices, but some readers may be put-off by it as it may not offer the kind of closure and sense of an ending that a more expected end would have offered.
Therefore, for casual readers, The Square of Sevens offers a great read for people who are ok with a a winding, sometimes convoluted plot structure. The narrator may not seem unreliable initially, but that’s part of the appeal the story has, since it’s what allows the reader to become more invested in the story than they otherwise might. The Square of Sevens is also a story that might appeal to readers who enjoy books centered on female characters who are faced with social restrictions that they’re able to transcend, even if that transcendence may come at a price.
For writers, The Square of Sevens offers a unique portrayal of unreliable narrators intertwined with third-person narration as a way of including some of the plot twists that characterize the book. Shephard-Robinson was also able to weave together the uncertainty of the evidence in a way that still felt plausible until the very end, which meant that it was all the more unnerving at the last page when everything was fully in focus. If writers are interested in creating this kind of impact on their readers, they would benefit from reading The Square of Sevens to better understand how it’s done.
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What’s Next?
I am an avid reader and have quite a few thoughts on how some books could benefit both people that want to be entertained and those looking to sharpen their literary skills.
If you’re interested in finding out more about what I’ve been reading – and how it could benefit you – I will be publishing those thoughts on Fridays on a weekly basis. Check back next week for a discussion of Olivie Blakes’s The Atlas Paradox!
The Writerly Review 