Yesterday I found my review of WHAT’S BRED IN THE BONE had vanished from Goodreads. I immediately suspected it had been censored because of my choosing an impolite label for this book.

Today, though, it is back. I must therefore blame Goodreads’ squirrelly platform instead. But I am not sure. So I am posting what I wrote about this book, back in September 2023, because though it was not particularly brilliant, I want to remember what I said. Also, I think this book deserves to be better known.

Without further ado, I bring you WHAT’S BRED IN THE BONE by Allen Grant.

The first book in a long while that prompted me to add another tag (“batshit crazy”). I look forward to enlarging this shelf.

A friend recommended this book to me years ago; I downloaded it to my Kindle and forgot about it. In a dry spell of online book loans from the library, I happened across this one and decided to give it a try. So glad I did!

I will quote briefly from her blog (The Secret Victorianist) which sums it up better than I can hope to:

“If you’re after a novel with identical twin heroes who get toothache simultaneously, a heroine who struggles to overcome an overwhelming desire to dance with snakes (or feather boas), murder, illegitimacy and a rather morally dubious spell of diamond-hunting in South Africa, then this one’s definitely for you.”

How can a novel more than a century old, with so many ridiculous elements, be so much fun to read? I think it is the entertaining writing style, which keeps the absurd plot humming along.

The premise implied in the title, that genes powerfully affect character, is a potentially troubling and implicitly racist one, but this is never allowed to become an overwhelming theme — it just lingers in the background. A young women inherits a love of dancing with snakes from an (exotic, never made entirely clear exactly from where) ancestor, but in sturdy English fashion resists this, and triumphs over it. As one does. The natives of South Africa are depicted as savage, and some of the descriptions are cringe, yet it could be much worse for something written in this era. The author displays a certain sympathy for them that I was not expecting.