Book Review: A Lady’s Handbook to Gadgets and Guile by Angela Bell
A Lady’s Handbook to Gadgets and Guile by Angela Bell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A Lady’s Handbook to Gadgets and Guile is an absolutely delightful story. Drawing inspiration from Little Women, Inspector Gadget, and Victorian England, it is also something uniquely and wonderfully its own. Bell’s sophomore novel is funny, heartfelt, faith-filled, and a joy from start to finish. It also delivers some wonderful disability representation that is going to provide solace and soothing affirmation to those struggling with chronic pain and severe anxiety.
Margaret Kingsley is an inventor for a secret society of lady inspectors: Daughters of Genius Society, or D.O.G.S. for short. She is comfortable in her spinsterhood, though that comfort doesn’t extend to her own body. After surviving an accident that left her riddled with disabling chronic pain and reliant on a wheelchair the majority of the time, Margaret’s life has never been normal. She has to navigate life through the veil of her pain, determining what she has the energy and ability to accomplish each day. She knows that she’ll never marry, and will always have to be cared for by her parents, but she’s thankful to have found purpose and a group of fellow lady inspectors who are more like sisters than friends. Between the family, the purpose, the friendships, her deep relationship with God and the solace she finds in music, she feels that she has much to be thankful for.
Then enters Charles Noble, former concert pianist who gave up his music career to help care for his father after a stroke debilitated him. Charles deals with extreme anxiety and panic attacks, which he suppresses as he’s not the one dealing with tangible, physical suffering. Now serving as a secretary in a law office, Charles is offered a temporary job as an event planner for London’s most famous inventor as he celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of his mechanical empire. It’s through this job that Charles crosses paths with Margaret, with whom he immediately falls head over heels in love. When she recruits him to aid in a mission involving this famed inventor and purloined patents, he jumps at the opportunity to spend more time with her.
Both main characters are living with the fallout of past tragedies, as well as with guilt over the weight of that fallout pressing down those they love most. He sees her in a way no man has ever seen her. And she understands his anxiety in a way that even he has never grasped. God uses them to bring solace to each other in some truly beautiful ways.
I related so much to Margaret’s struggles with chronic pain. While I’m currently in a stage of life where my own is more manageable, I remember having many of those same functionality struggles in the past. It’s so hard to look perfectly healthy while being riddled with and debilitated by pain that the world cannot see. It makes you feel like a fraud, to be an invalid in a way that is not easily observable. And no one judges you for it more harshly than you judge yourself. The guilt that comes with feeling as though you’re inconveniencing and letting down the people in your life is almost as intolerable as the pain. I’m so incredibly grateful to be in a stage of life where my own chronic pain is not only manageable, but even dormant most days. However, if and when that pain returns with any vengeance, I can see myself reaching for this book when I’m seeking solace, when it would comfort and soothe to feel understood and not alone in the suffering.
This is a wonderful story, packed to the brim with charm and faith and compassionate depictions of living with chronic pain. Not only did I enjoy my time with it immensely, I’m thankful for the ways it made me feel seen, affirmed, comforted, and understood. While the romance and the banter, the sisterhood and the adventure were all delightful, it is the strong core of faith and that depiction of chronic pain that will have me returning to this book when life gets hard. I can’t recommend it—or its predecessor, A Lady’s Guide to Marvels and Misadventure—highly enough. And I can’t wait to read more stories about the lady inspectors of the Daughters of Genius Society!