An admirable exercise in literary mimicry, but unlikely to excite genuine fans of Austen.
McVeigh’s retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice focuses on Darcy’s perspective.
For the most part, the author’s retelling of Austen’s classic tale is precisely that—the basic elements of the story remain the same, in an homage too loving to allow much revision. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. FitzwilliamDarcy make their acquaintance in acrimony—he offends her with his aloof social clumsiness, which is misread as acerbic pride. She is courted by the predatory George Wickham, a charming but amoral and cunning man who also attempts to take advantage of Darcy’s naive sister, Georgiana. Meanwhile, Darcy’s closest friend, Mr. Charles Bingley, courts Elizabeth’s sister, Jane; she’s the beauty of the family, but so impassively unassuming that Darcy wrongly assumes she’s not really all that romantically interested and intrusively prepares to thwart their courtship. The major addition to the plot from McVeigh is a potential scandal involving Darcy—in Rome, he falls in love with an Italian singer, Giuditta Negri, a beautiful but temperamental woman who accuses him of making romantic commitments and then skipping town, a development that threatens to sully his family’s name. The author masterfully captures not only Darcy’s strange combination of decency, aristocratic stuffiness, and rhetorical bluntness, but also the lightsome elegance of Austen’s style: “It was all madness, of course. I could not imagine what people would say. An Italian noblewoman might be acceptable, but Giuditta was equally undistinguished by birth or fortune. If one inclined towards the brutal, she was a beauty with a voice.”
By including excerpts from Darcy’s diaries, the author aims to more sensitively plumb his innermost thoughts, an aim she admirably achieves. The reader sees, in sharp relief, the tension within Darcy between his moral rectitude and sense of honor and his clumsy truculence. Also, McVeigh has a remarkable sense of the literary world Austen established, and she is able to recreate parts of it with masterly skill. More specifically, she reproduces Austen’s prose style with great fidelity, in all of its charming sophistication and clever wit. However, this virtuosic imitation is only that—for the most part, this retelling is the same story, written in the same style, but any devoted fan of Austen will detect the distance between original and counterfeit. Why not simply reread the peerless original, then? One could imagine an admirer of Austen, who has read Pride and Prejudice countless times, pining for a whole new story—maybe a glimpse of Darcy’s life set before the action of the novel, or of his time with Elizabeth after the book is over. Instead, McVeigh largely retells the same story, and, for all of its pleasures, this novel is nowhere near as mesmerizing as the one that inspired it. The author’s obvious reverence for Austen actually appears to stymie her creativity—she seems insufficiently bold to stray too far from Austen’s original vision and inadvertently disrespect the novel by staking out new ground. One can’t help but credit McVeigh’s powers of imitation, and to share her enthusiasm for a marvelous work of literature. Nonetheless, a true Austen devotee is more likely to be bored by this reproduction than excited by the attempt at reimagining.
An admirable exercise in literary mimicry, but unlikely to excite genuine fans of Austen.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 978-1916882379
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Warleigh Hall Press
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Bailey hits it out of the park with her latest spicy romance.
Two ambitious athletes plus one fake-dating arrangement—what could go wrong?
Though it’s only his first season for the Boston Bearcats hockey team, Robbie Corrigan has a well-established reputation as a playboy. He’s got major skills on the ice, and he’s also much more likely to love ’em and leave ’em than he is to build any long, meaningful relationships. Naturally, he’s just met the one woman who seems completely resistant to his charm: Skylar Page, a Boston University softball pitcher. When they meet over a friendly Saturday morning baseball game, Robbie instantly makes a poor impression by bragging to his teammates about his latest conquest within Skylar’s hearing. He thinks she’s gorgeous, though, and when he sets his sights on her, he’s surprised that she doesn’t seem to know it. Despite her initial distaste for Robbie, Skylar grudgingly confesses that she could use his help. If they pretend to date, maybe her current crush—her brother’s best friend—will finally sit up and take notice of her in a romantic way. The timing is less than ideal, since Robbie will have to team up with Skylar in the Page family’s latest wilderness competition, but it turns out that Robbie’s willingness to play fake boyfriend stems from some very real feelings. He wants to prove to her that he’s a changed man, and redeeming himself in her eyes starts with making sure she knows that she can really trust him. The latest addition to Bailey’s Big Shots series is a sexy, feel-good romance brimming over with the author’s trademark humor and dirty talk. While Skylar and Robbie’s dynamic doesn’t quite reach the level of enemies-to-lovers—he’s so head-over-heels for her that there’s no room for any real mean-spiritedness—their playful snark doubles as a welcome dash of foreplay in the lead-up to some seriously steamy scenes. Robbie’s efforts to show Skylar that he’s turned over a new leaf also result in some of the book’s best moments, emphasizing his commitment to becoming the type of man he knows she deserves.
Bailey hits it out of the park with her latest spicy romance.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9780063380837
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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