“It made him vividly aware that nothing was for ever; that
pain had its tides, its pauses.” Truth.
1.14 Longbourn
I loved this book.
Reading it with my mom really helped me to get through and stick with
it. making it the quickest I have finished anything in months. And maybe that’s why I loved it so much
– I really needed to read again.
It is a retelling of Pride and Prejudice through the eyes of
the downstairs help – basically a fancy fanfiction that falls into all the rage
of the recent Downton fad.
I admit that the first third of the book felt like a pretty
simple retelling: We have a maid
who likes two men, one who would be the “Wickham” and one who would be the
“Darcy”, and so she must make the choice to stay in service or follow her
dreams to travel and live unencumbered.
But then the story shifted away from all my assumptions and became a
wonderfully heartfelt story about sacrifice and true family. The additional details to the Pride and
Prejudice characters were seamless and the two very different worlds of
characters all living in Longbourn seemed perfectly placed and interestingly
juxtaposed. For all the pomp and
circumstance of P & P you never really slow down to think of how all those
balls and dinners are put together and it was nice to see that being slogged
down by all those details didn’t make the characters doing them any less
interesting, in many cases they were the better by far.
If anything, this story was a bit harsh on our dear Bennets,
but isn’t that the way life works?
No one really sees anything the same way. Hence, fanfiction.
And boy oh boy, is the publishing world taking notice.
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