Just adding my recent Kindle purchases (I agree that the monthly deals were not up to much this month - fortunately, as Palegreenstars points out!). I'm not sure how many of them actually were part of the monthly deal, as I got a bit side-tracked and lost where I was in relation to the navigation
:
The Ascent of Rum Doodle (thanks to everyone who mentioned it!)
The Gustav Sonata
Different Class (delighted to see this for 99p as I enjoyed Gentlemen and Players earlier this year)
Hidden Depths (Vera book 3)
Anna Karenina
Mr Finchley Discovers His England (not sure it was strictly part of the monthly deals, but I was led to it by Rum Doodle and it looked ideal for my mood right now)
Just finished:
62. The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow
I think I'm the only person on here to have really rated this! For me, the value of the story wasn't in its relationship with P&P (which I agree does make it into a sort of elevated fanfic) but in its attempts to be a new Regency novel. And I think it worked better as the latter than the former.
The first part concentrates on retelling the events of P&P from the point of view of Mary. Because of the story's familiarity, I found that this section dragged a bit for me - it didn't really take off until about two-thirds of the way through, when the action moves to 2 years later. The first part was ok: there was some fun to be had with seeing the events of the Netherfield ball through Mary's eyes, but I think I could have done with less of this section generally. (I know I'm in a minority: most of the reviews I've seen have been from P&P fans who just want to wallow in this world a little longer and don't care for the original bits.)
The second two-thirds was much more enjoyable for me: it's where we see Mary really start to bloom, and to discover herself away from the toxic influence of her family. And you do see just how toxic they would have been to a shy, bookish, awkward teenager: sisters who paired off and excluded her, a sardonic and forbidding father, a shrewish and silly mother. During a visit to Pemberley, you also see just how awful it would be to have Darcy as a BIL
- and also how intolerable it would be to suffer Lizzie and Darcy exchanging intense glances over the breakfast table.
The book's focus on Mary's personal development is interesting and felt very authentic - I felt that the book had a real serious moral purpose just as many other books of the period did. So, at various points, we see "pride and prejudice" opposed, but also "sense and sensibility", "pleasure and prudence" and "feeling and finking" (just to keep the alliteration
). Mary also grapples throughout with the problem of how to secure one's personal happiness: is it dependent on external circumstance, or is it something that can be "manufactured" within oneself? Hadlow very smartly introduces an element of Romanticism (which has always seemed strangely absent from JA herself, when you consider when she was writing). I loved the discussions about books (about Catherine Macaulay's History of England versus Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads ), and also the typically Romantic jaunt to the Lake District in order to experience the sublime in person. Maybe it's because I overdosed on this stuff at University, but it reminded me off being an over-intense undergraduate having late night conversations about Thomas Love Peacock or about Byron's spats with Robert Southey
. (I had to do four "period papers" covering English lit from 1300 to the present day which actually meant about 1950 and the "long 18th century" one was my favourite by miles.)
I think Hadlow actually did a pretty decent job on the prose: it wasn't too excruciatingly cod-Regency for me (although there was a marked contrast between the prologue's arch Austenisms and the rest of the novel, which was written more naturally). I'm a big fan of Georgette Heyer and I'm generally very wary of other people's attempts to write novels (especially romances) set in this period: pretty much every other one I've ever read has been terrible, full of anachronisms and behavioural solecisms and tin-eared language. This one was pretty good in comparison - and Hadlow picked up on many characteristic turns of phrase and bits of vocabulary. So, for me, this novel was both successful and enjoyable!