Man of la Book has won The Gendarme by Mark Mustian

Congratulations and happy reading!

© 2012 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

Mrs Gardiner instantly felt a pang for talking so forthrightly to a young woman.  ‘Well,’ she said awkwardly.  ‘Yes, to be sure, but Mary, remember, that goodness is in part chosen.  Lydia was given all the advantages of respectable breeding and upbringing, and she chose to throw all that away for an irredeemable wastrel.  You have nothing to fear.  You have too much sense to lose your self-respect in a bad alliance.’

I don’t know what I fear more, Mary thought, but could not say as much to her aunt.  Losing my respectability…

Or never having the opportunity to prove myself.  (from The Unexpected Miss Bennet, page 42)

Oh, how I loved The Unexpected Miss Bennet, so much so that (for the moment, at least), it’s at the top of my list of favorite Austen-inspired novels.  Patrice Sarath’s novel is a sequel of sorts to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and this time, the focus is on the middle Bennet daughter, Mary.  Mary is not the most exciting character in Pride in Prejudice.  In fact, the poor girl is laughed at and dismissed by everyone and is known for reading and quoting Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women and for her love of singing and playing the pianoforte, though she’s not very good at it.

In The Unexpected Miss Bennet, Mrs. Bennet has resigned herself to the fact that Mary is just Mary, will never be married, and will keep her company in her old age.  Mary is understandably worried about her future, as when her father dies, the family home will belong to their ridiculous and patronizing cousin, Mr. Collins.  With her two older sisters married off, her youngest sister disowned by the family, and her other sister, Kitty, just as obnoxiously flighty as their mother, Mary does a lot of soul searching and realizes that Fordyce might not have all the answers.

Her sisters Jane and Lizzy decide they need to take action to ensure that Mary doesn’t just waste away in the corner where she has long been relegated.  Lizzy invites her to stay at Pemberley, where she begins to blossom.  She meets Mr. Aikens, a man who doesn’t read, is passionate about horses, and has such an exuberant personality that a few minutes in his presence is exhausting.  For the first time, Mary is dancing, not playing the pianoforte, and she even beings spending time outdoors.  When a trip to Rosings with the Darcys to visit Lady Catherine de Bourgh turns into an extended stay for Mary and gives her a taste of independence, she learns to stand up for herself.  She might not be as beautiful as Jane or as accomplished as Mr. Darcy’s sister, Georgiana, but Mary proves that she can be more than what the world expected.

I enjoy when Austen-inspired novels take on characters placed in the background by Austen.  Sarath does not depend on the Darcys to carry this story; aside from Wickham rearing his ugly head, Mr. Darcy is hardly seen at all — and Sarath’s Mary is complex and intriguing enough to carry the story on her own.  Mary’s coming of age is exciting and wholly believable, and Sarath creates plenty of tension by placing Mary in the line of fire of both Lady Catherine and Mr. Collins.  Those scenes of heated dialogue are fantastic, and I couldn’t help but cheer Mary all the way.

The Unexpected Miss Bennet is a breath of fresh air in the Austensque genre and exemplifies why I can’t get enough of these books.  It is both unique yet true to the original, and I couldn’t put it down.  Sarath does a wonderful job creating a Mary who has newfound spunk and a sense of humor.  I never expected that Mary Bennet could be charming, but I think even Austen would approve.

Book 3 for Explore the Many Genres of Jane Austen Challenge (Supporting Characters)

Disclosure: I received a copy of The Unexpected Miss Bennet from Berkley/Penguin for review. I am an IndieBound affiliate and an Amazon associate.

© 2012 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

“No, Katniss!  No!  You can’t go!”

“Prim, let go,” I say harshly, because this is upsetting me and I don’t want to cry.  (from The Hunger Games, page 23)

Katniss is one of the main characters in The Hunger Games.  After Prim’s name is drawn for the Hunger Games, Katniss thinks her sister is too weak and would not outlast the other 23 contestants in a game in which the players fight to the death, so Katniss takes her place.  The other main character is Peeta, the baker’s son.  One boy and one girl in each district go to the Hunger Games, and Peeta was the boy tribute from District 12.  The setting is in the future, on a train and in a forest, which is the Hunger Games arena.

I think the most interesting part of the book was when Katniss finds Peeta injured and nearly dead near the stream, and she nurses him back to health even though the rules say only one of them can survive.  I think junior high students (and others) who like action, suspense, and excitement would adore The Hunger Games.

Disclosure: The Girl borrowed my copy of The Hunger Games. I am an IndieBound affiliate and an Amazon associate.

© 2012 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

In real life, alas, things are not so simple.  Wives cannot be got out of the way by imprisoning them, husbands cannot be poisoned and good and virtuous heroines do not always marry the men they love.  (from Henry Tilney’s Diary, page 93)

Henry Tilney’s Diary is a retelling of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey from the point of view of its hero.  Amanda Grange is well known for her diaries of Austen’s heroes (and even one of a rake), and I’ve enjoyed how she gets into the heads of the male characters and gives them a voice.

The novel opens in 1790 when Henry is just 16, giving readers a chance to meet the Tilneys in happier times.  Henry’s mother is still alive, though frequently ill, and his father, General Tilney, tries to whip his older brother, Frederick, into shape by forcing him to join the army despite the fact that he stands to inherit their estate, Northanger Abbey.  Henry and his younger sister, Eleanor, just 13, are very close and have similar personalities.  Both are romantics and take pleasure in Gothic novels.

Grange successfully uses the book-within-a-book technique to show how ridiculous and enjoyable Henry and Eleanor find such novels.  The two read A Sicilian Romance together and poke fun at the formula used by the Gothic novelists, with heroines who lose their mothers, are forced to marry men they don’t love, live in haunted houses, find family members hidden away or are locked away themselves, and faint at every turn.

Although each of the Tilney children has their own fortune, General Tilney is adamant that they each marry someone with money or a title, and he is always trying to set them up with children of his friends.  Even though Frederick has given up on finding the perfect mate, Henry and Eleanor wish to marry for love.  Henry even jokingly states that his heroine must first and foremost be a fan of novels.

Fast-forward eight years later, and the Tilneys are a more solemn crowd, having lost their mother and Eleanor falling for a man of whom her father would never approve.  A trip to Bath lifts their spirits when they meet Catherine Morland, a young woman who loves Gothic novels and whose innocence captures Henry’s heart.  When Catherine is invited to stay at Northanger Abbey, she can’t wait to see a real abbey, and Henry encourages her fanciful notions of ghosts behind its closed doors and within its secret spaces.  Meanwhile, he and Eleanor are wondering if their father has had a change of heart, as General Tilney bends over backward to impress Catherine even though she doesn’t have a fortune or a title.

Fans of Northanger Abbey will enjoy reading Henry’s side of the story, especially his thoughts on Catherine’s zeal for Gothic novels, his brother’s flirtations with Catherine’s brother’s intended, and John Thorpe’s bragging and designs on Catherine.  However, you could easily enjoy Henry Tilney’s Diary without having read Austen’s novel, though I suspect by the time you’re done, you’ll be rushing to get your hands on a copy of Northanger Abbey, where Austen’s humor is on display as Catherine fancies herself a heroine in a Gothic novel but merely ends up embarrassing herself.

I really enjoyed Henry Tilney’s Diary because it enabled me to revisit Northanger Abbey and see it from a different perspective.  It is impossible to know how Austen imagined Henry’s side of the story, but Grange understands Austen’s view of Gothic novels, respects the original novel, and obviously has a real love for the characters Austen created, so her take feels authentic.  I can’t get enough of these Austen-inspired novels, and those that are original but don’t stray too far from Austen’s works tend to be my favorites.

Book 2 for Explore the Many Genres of Jane Austen Challenge (Variation)

Disclosure: I received a copy of Henry Tilney’s Diary from Berkley/Penguin for review. I am an IndieBound affiliate and an Amazon associate.

© 2012 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

I spent so many years reading books I had to read for my degree that as soon as I graduated, I vowed I would only read books that I want to read.  Yet even after a horrible attempt to read The Brothers Karamazov, there are still classics (beyond Jane Austen) that I want to read at some point.  However, after delving into Dostoyevsky (and snoring through 60 pages before giving up), I haven’t been too motivated to tackle them.

The Western Lit Survival Kit is the perfect book for readers like me who wonder if it really is worthwhile to dust off the many classics weighing down our shelves and finally give them a chance.  Newman covers literary works and authors/poets from ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Age of Reason, through the “Messy Twentieth,” which includes such authors as Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway.  Newman rates the literary works on a scale of 1 to 10 in three categories:  Importance, Accessibility, and Fun.  I rather like the last category, though she found Moby Dick to be a lot more fun than I did!

Newman uses a lot of humor in her discussions about the authors and their works, and she doesn’t hold back in her criticisms.  She points out that T.S. Eliot was anti-Semitic, and then notes that “as the poet Tom Raworth has pointed out, without the initial S in his name, it would spell ‘toilet’ backwards”  (page 251).  About Henry James she writes, “The other Jamesian keynote is the convoluted sentence.  These sentences are a sort of literary Great Wall:  while other, similar, structures exist, none are quite so long with so little apparent reason”  (page 242).  No work is too beloved to be touched, and I love and appreciate Newman’s honesty.

Newman even covers the novels of my favorite author, Jane Austen.  She gives perfect 10s to Pride and Prejudice, but that’s not what pleased me most about this section.  I loved how Newman makes the case for men to read Austen’s novels:

The combination of her decorous manner, the obsession with marriage, her protagonists’ gender, and her gender has made generations of straight guys feel that reading Jane Austen would be equivalent to wearing women’s clothes at home.  We don’t want to twist anyone’s arm, but male readers should reconsider.  Jane Austen lacks most of the features that make rom-coms unbearable for many men.  Although these are love stories, Austen tends to skip the confessions of love, along with the weddings, the feelings, and the kisses.  She uses the marriage plot as a simple backbone for a million snarky remarks.  Really, these are more like unusually smart situation comedies set in the eighteenth-century, where the situation is “getting the daughters married off.”  (page 183)

Although Newman may not have convinced my husband to give Austen a try (sigh), she succeeded in convincing me that I shouldn’t feel bad about not having read as many classics as I might like.  Moreover, she made me excited about my new book club’s first pick, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, and the upcoming read-along of A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway for the WWI Reading Challenge at War Through the Generations.  If only The Western Lit Survival Kit had been published years ago, I might have avoided the whole book-club-destroying Dostoyevsky fiasco (shudder).

Disclosure: I borrowed The Western Lit Survival Kit from my local library. I am an IndieBound affiliate and an Amazon associate.

© 2012 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

Here is what I received:

Catalina by Laurie Soriano, from Lummox Press for the Indie Lit Awards (Amazon/IndieBound)

CATALINA begins on America’s east coast, where the “dense woods are full of secrets / full of children with their heads ducked against the weather.” The book’s first poems (in the “Coast” section) explore a gradual coming to awareness on that right coast. The book’s second section (“To Coast”) takes the long journey west to the Pacific, “through the great rippling heartland, a bridge between Oceans,” with an accompanying focus on the mysteries and conflicts that vie for our attention as we lose the momentum of youth and settle in to our real lives. The third set of poems (“Being Here”) celebrates the present moment, the self as a bridge between generations, as a conduit of the life force. The poems of the fourth and final section (“Looking Out”) study the view out beyond the continent one has crossed; to what is next, the possibility of flight into other worlds beyond the rituals of everyday. There, out in the “endless churning ocean” is the next body of land, an island that is “where to go next, where not to go.” The book’s poems calmly open the doors to reveal magic and tragedy and make the case for looking out while staying put. These are poems of the restless American spirit—”We ache for shuttling further, for the oblivion of the new”—and the peace that comes with the recognition that there is nowhere better to go. (from Amazon.com)

Mr. Darcy Forever by Victoria Connelly, from Sourcebooks (Amazon/IndieBound)

Sarah and Mia Castle are closer than best friends and share just about everything, including a deep and abiding love for all things relating to Jane Austen.  Their annual trip to the Jane Austen Festival in Bath is a highlight of their lives — until the year they discover that no matter how close two sisters may be, it’s impossible to share one man between them.  Even if he does seem like their own perfect Mr. Darcy, if one wins him, won’t both of them lose?  (publisher’s summary)

The Three Colonels: Jane Austen’s Fighting Men by Jack Caldwell, from Sourcebooks (Amazon/IndieBound)

Love reigns supreme for our three brave colonels in this epic Jane Austen-inspired tale.  Colonels Buford, Fitzwilliam, and Brandon are enjoying their courtships and their early married lives with three beloved Austen heroines.  The couples lead tranquil lives — until Napoleon escapes from exile.

From the serenity of Regency England to the scandal and intrigue of the Congress of Vienna, three gentlemen live, love, fight, and defend their country from Napoleon’s voracious ambition.

As the three colonels set out to meet their destiny on the fields of Waterloo, Anne, Caroline, and Marianne defend their hearts against the fear of losing their loved ones forever.

A continuation of both Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility, The Three Colonels delves fearlessly into unexplored parts of Jane Austen’s world.  (publisher’s summary)

Darcy’s Decision by Maria Grace, from the author (Amazon)

Six months after his father’s passing, Fitzwilliam Darcy still finds solace in his morning reflections at his parents’ graves.  Only in the quiet solitude of the churchyard does he indulge his grief.  None but his unlikely mentor recognize the heartache and insecurity plaguing him as he shoulders the enormous burden of being Master of Pemberley.

Not all are pleased with his choice of advisor.  Lady Catherine complains Darcy allows him too much influence.  Lord Matlock argues, “Who is he to question the God appointed social order?”  But the compassionate wisdom Darcy finds in his counselor keeps him returning for guidance even though it causes him to doubt everything he has been taught.

In the midst of his struggle to reinvent himself, his school chum, Charles Bingley, arrives.  Darcy hopes the visit will offer some respite from the uproar of his life.  Instead of relief, Darcy discovers his father’s darkest secret staring him in the face.  Pushed to his limits, Darcy must overcome the issues that ruined his father and, with his friends and mentor at his side, restore his tarnished birthright.  (publisher’s summary)

What books did you add to your shelves recently?

Disclosure: I am an IndieBound affiliate and an Amazon associate.

© 2012 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

This book goes a little farther in showing how the Holocaust continues to affect Vladek decades later.  His second wife, Mala, has left him, and he begs Art and his wife to spend the summer with him in his cottage in the Catskills.  The two just want to make sure Vladek is okay on his own, but Vladek’s frailties and hoarding are on full display; when a dish breaks, he says he will glue it back together, and he even tries to return half-eaten groceries to the store so they will not go to waste.

Vladek’s hoarding and refusal to spend money anger Art, who still struggles with his parents’ Holocaust experiences and his mother’s suicide.  He even feels some sibling rivalry with Richieu, the brother he never knew except in faded photographs.  After Vladek’s death, Art has trouble writing about his father’s Auschwitz experiences and dealing with the success of Maus I.  He sees a psychiatrist, a Czech Jew who survived two camps and helps Art overcome his writing block.

Much of Maus II is about how Vladek survived Auschwitz.  The creativity he exhibited in finding work and trading for food while he and Anja were in the ghetto and later in hiding also helped him stay alive in the concentration camp.  Vladek’s story is both heart-breaking and downright amazing, and the fact that he was able to communicate with his wife in the camp and even help keep her alive shows the depth of their love and makes it easy to see why he fell apart after her suicide.  The evacuation of Auschwitz, the death march to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, the overcrowded cattle cars to Dachau, and the spread of typhus are described in few but powerful words.

Just like Maus I, the illustrations in Maus II are horrifying and necessary.  They tell a story of their own, rich with symbolism given that the characters are once again drawn as animals.  The Jews are depicted as mice, the Nazis and other Germans as cats, the Poles as pigs, and a lone Frenchman as a frog.  Once again, I was so involved in the story that I forgot after awhile that the illustrations were of animals even while I appreciated the symbolism.

Honestly, I didn’t expect Maus to affect me as much as it did.  I didn’t think a comic book tale with illustrations of animals could be so powerful, but I’m glad I was wrong.  These books brought me to tears, and some scenes hit me hard like a kick to the stomach.  I am always amazed at how people are able to survive the harshest and worst of circumstances, and Maus is one of the most gripping survivor stories I’ve ever read.  Spiegelman does an excellent job immortalizing his parents and showing the burdens that the survivors carried throughout their lives, even passing them on to their children.  It’s hard to put into words just how these books affected me, so I urge you to read them.  I hope you find, like I have, that they provide much food for thought and will sear their haunting images into your mind for a long time.

Disclosure: I borrowed Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began from my local library. I am an IndieBound affiliate and an Amazon associate.

© 2012 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

In Maus I:  A Survivor’s Tale:  My Father Bleeds History, Spiegelman, a comic book artist/writer, wants to tell his father’s survival story.  He doesn’t have the best relationship with his father, Vladek, but he begins making frequent visits to listen as his father recounts his time in Poland just before and during World War II.

Vladek tells his son how he met his wife, Anja, who committed suicide in 1968 when Art was 20 but whose mental anguish was apparent before the Holocaust.  Anja’s parents were wealthy, and the pair lived comfortably while Vladek worked hard running a textile factory.  They had a son, Richieu, who sadly did not survive the war.

Maus I follows Vladek’s story as conditions for the Jews degrade in Poland and elsewhere in Europe as war is waged.  Vladek talks about how he and Anja survived living in a ghetto, how creative and daring he was in finding work and trading items for food, and how they managed to live for some time in hiding.  An ominous cloud hung above the story as I read, and I always had this feeling that something would go wrong, someone would betray them, and eventually their luck would run out.  Alas, that feeling proved correct, as this first installment in Vladek’s story ends with his and Anja’s arrival at Auschwitz.

Vladek’s story, even before he sets foot in Auschwitz, is painful, but as the story is told in his words, there is also hope, for readers know that he survived.  Still, the effects of living close to starvation in the ghetto and the concentration camp took its toll.  From Vladek’s interactions with his son and his second wife, Mala, readers see how he carries the Holocaust with him every day as he hoards things, refuses to spend money when he could reuse something or fix something himself, and constantly worries that Mala is trying to steal all the money that he has saved over the years.

Art’s struggles as the child of Holocaust survivors are apparent, as is his grief over his mother’s suicide.  He channels all of these hurts into his work, and even as he constantly expresses his annoyance with his father, his fascination with his father’s Holocaust story and his respect for all that his parents endured shines through.

In Maus, Spiegelman uses animals to portray his family and the other people who play a role in the story.  The symbolism of the Jews as mice, the Nazis and other Germans as cats, and the Poles as pigs seems obvious.  However, I honestly didn’t pay much attention to the use of animals in the illustrations, and even though I paid close attention to the drawings as I read, I was so wrapped up in the the story that I didn’t take much notice of the animal symbolism after awhile.  The story would have affected me just as strongly had the illustrations featured humans, and I didn’t find it difficult to remember that despite the animal imagery, the book is non-fiction.

Maus I is a quick read at about 160 pages, but that doesn’t mean readers should speed through it.  The use of graphic non-fiction is an interesting way to depict one family’s Holocaust story, and it is just as gripping and heart-breaking as it would have been in straight prose.  Spiegelman does a wonderful job making it feel as though the reader is sitting across from his father and listening intently as he recounts his tale of survival, and I was on the edge of my seat throughout.  I felt extremely sad and weighed down when I finished this book, but I immediately started the next book because I just had to find out what happened to Vladek and Anja in Auschwitz.  This is one of those books whose images will haunt me for some time, but I highly recommend it for readers interested in the Holocaust who want something more than the typical memoir.

(My thoughts on Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began will post tomorrow.)

Disclosure: I borrowed Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History from my local library. I am an IndieBound affiliate and an Amazon associate.

© 2012 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

Yates’ captions to the photos submitted by “Wreckporters” are sometimes more hilarious than the cake wrecks themselves.  We especially enjoyed her rendition of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, complete with some horrifyingly creepy cakes.  The Girl really liked the various interpretations of Santa Claus by the so-called “Wreckorators,” ranging from silly to scary.  Her favorite was Santa with red-painted, very movie star-like lips.  My favorites were the cakes that merged Star Trek and Star Wars, along with cakes sporting ridiculous spelling errors and those highlighting some decorators’ inability to follow simple instructions from customers.  One cake featured a huge space in the middle and was the decorator’s interpretation of a mother’s request for a “space cake” for her son’s Jedi birthday party.

I found this book funny, but I laughed more and harder while reading the first book, Cake Wrecks.  I think restricting the book to just holiday cakes put a damper on the humor somewhat.  The variety of cakes and the awful misspellings were what I enjoyed most in the first book, and that variety just wasn’t present in this one.  However, The Girl loved Wreck the Halls even more than the first book, and she nearly died laughing at the picture of a gingerbread man with a sprig of mistletoe randomly placed in his armpit.  (I loved that cake wreck, too!)

If you find these decorating disasters hilarious and enjoy the Cake Wrecks blog as much as I do, you won’t want to miss Wreck the Halls.  I hope a third book is in the works!

Disclosure: We borrowed Wreck the Halls from our local library. I am an IndieBound affiliate and an Amazon associate.

© 2012 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

Dreaming of Mr. Darcy is the second in Victoria Connelly’s series about Jane Austen addicts, following on the heels of A Weekend With Mr. Darcy.  The heroine this time around is Kay Ashton, a young woman stuck in a dead-end job who inherits some money and decides to make her dreams come true.  She buys and remodels a bed and breakfast in Lyme Regis, a seaside town that plays an important role in Kay’s favorite book, Jane Austen’s Persuasion, and she plans to spend her time finishing her book, The Illustrated Darcy.

Kay is all alone in the world; she’s unlucky in love, her father left when she was a child, and she’s still grieving the deaths of her mother and a close friend.  But her quiet days walking along the Cobb and enjoying the views of the sea are turned upside down when the cast of the new big-screen adaptation of Persuasion rent rooms at her B&B.  She befriends the shy and insecure actress, Gemma, who’s living in her mother’s shadow, and the equally shy and unlucky-in-love screenwriter, Adam, who encourages Kay to have her work published.

Kay is too busy falling in love with the dashing actor, Oli Wade Owen, who plays Captain Wentworth, to notice that her efforts at matchmaking Gemma and Adam are failing as badly as those of Austen’s beloved heroine, Emma Woodhouse.  The minute Oli winks at her, Kay imagines herself as his wife, ignoring everyone’s warnings not to get involved with him.  Kay is a daydreamer, and she lets her fantasies about fictional heroes interfere with real life.

Dreaming of Mr. Darcy is a fun novel, one that makes me think my obsession with Austen-inspired novels is actually not that bad.  I loved how Connelly worked in the Austen references and especially the focus on my favorite Austen novel, Persuasion.  Her characters were likable, aside from the obnoxiously self-centered actress, Beth, who flirts endlessly with Oli, and Gemma’s mom, Kim, who is desperately clinging to the fame that has followed her since her one successful part years ago.  Kay was charming, even though I wanted to smack some sense into her.  I could see how her daydreams kept her from feeling so lonely, but she was so blind to the potential for happiness that was standing right in front of her.  Adam’s grandmother, Nana Craig, was a treat; I love feisty old ladies and their eccentricities.  Nana only wants the best for the grandson she raised, and her penchant for bright colors even if they clash was hilarious.  Gemma coming into her own and Adam learning to fight for what he wants were perfect compliments to the main story.

There are lots of romantic mishaps and misunderstandings in Dreaming of Mr. Darcy, certainly reminiscent of Austen’s books.  Connelly is fast becoming one of my favorite authors of modern-day Austen-inspired novels.  I definitely recommend this one if you love all things Austen as much as I do.  If you’ve been shying away from the Austen sequels and retellings because you’re wary of authors tinkering with Austen’s characters, then you should give this one a try.  Connelly uses original characters and plenty of humor to create lively new stories, and her love and respect for Austen’s novels shines through.

Book 1 for Explore the Many Genres of Jane Austen Challenge (Modern Adaptation)

Disclosure: I received a copy of Dreaming of Mr. Darcy from Sourcebooks for review. I am an IndieBound affiliate and an Amazon associate.

© 2012 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.