Skip to main content

Bibliophile reviews Vanity and Vexation (a kind of romance)



Author: Kate Fenton
Previously published as: Lions and Liquorice
Year published: 1995. American publication: 2005
Pages: 276
Genre: Romance (sort of)

The Story:
A film outfit arrives in a tiny Yorkshire village to film Pride and Prejudice. Local writer Llew Bevan looks on the proceedings with a jaundiced eye as the film’s star sweeps his widowed brother-in-law off his feet, and he himself can not help being attracted to not one, but two of the outsiders: haughty director Mary Dance, and a young woman who has a serious quarrel with Mary.

Technique and plot:
Ring any bells? No? Think Pride and Prejudice in a modern setting with older players and reversed gender roles.

I have avoided reading any of the “sequels” that have been written to Jane Austen’s novels, as I know no-one can do the characters as well as she did. But a modern spin-off is another matter. I read about this book several years ago while browsing the The Republic of Pemberley fansite. Everyone said it was hilarious and I thought it was an interesting idea. But finding it was a different matter. Lions and Liquorice, as it was originally titled, had been out of print for some time. It never came up in Ebay auctions and I was beginning to think I would never be able to read it, when I discovered it had been republished under a new title. I didn’t want to buy the expensive hardcover, so I patiently waited for the paperback and ordered it as soon as it was available. It was with anticipation that I opened the book to read it.

I can’t say I found much funny in the story. There are a few things worthy of a chuckle, but for the most part this is an ordinary novel about love and misunderstandings. It is well written but nothing more than that. It doesn’t sparkle, and it is not the kind of book I want to re-read. Not exactly a dud, but didn’t live up to expectations.

Rating: A decent read that will keep Austen fans guessing who’s who and whether “Elizabeth” will end up with “Wickham” this time around. Other readers will simply enjoy it for the story. 3 stars.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...
9 comments
Read more

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...
Post a Comment
Read more