Welcome to What I’ve Been Reading Lately, a feature where I’ll be giving short reviews of what I’m currently reading:
All links lead to the StoryGraph listing.
Catch Your Death by Ravena Guron
When three girls are stranded at the grand Bramble Estate in the middle of a snowstorm, they stumble into a murder plot. Someone has poisoned wealthy Emily Vanforte in the middle of a family dinner – which means Devi, Lizzie and Jayne are trapped in the house with a killer and a mystery to solve… (Credit: Usborne Publishing)
Here, we have a YA mystery that draws on many classic mystery tropes, making it entertaining for readers of all ages. Guron takes her love of Christie mysteries and creates a scintillating mystery that will have you on the edge of your seat. I’m halfway through, and I have no idea how it is going to end!
Jane Austen: The Chawton Letters edited by Kathryn Sutherland
The life of Jane Austen has fascinated the millions of readers around the world who cherish her work. A new collection presents an intimate portrait of Austen in her own words, showing the many details of her life that found echoes in her fiction, especially her keen observations of the “little matters”–the routines of reading, dining and taking tea, paying visits to family and friends, and walking to the shops or to send the post.
Brilliantly edited by Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen: The Chawton Letters uses Austen’s letters drawn from the collection held at Jane Austen’s House Museum at her former home in Chawton, Hampshire, to tell her life story. At age twenty-five, Austen left her first home, Steventon, Hampshire, for Bath. In 1809, she moved to Chawton, which was to be her home for the remainder of her short life. In her correspondence, we discover Austen’s relish for her regular visits to the shops and theaters of London, as well as the quieter routines of village life. We learn of her anxieties about the publication of Pride and Prejudice, her care in planning Mansfield Park, and her hilarious negotiations over the publication of Emma. (To her sister, Cassandra, Austen calls her publisher John Murray, “a Rogue, of course, but a civil one.”) Throughout, the Chawton letters testify to Jane’s close ties with her family, especially her sister, and the most moving letter is written by Cassandra just days after Jane’s death. The collection also reproduces pages from the letters in Austen’s own distinctive hand. (Credit: Bodleian Library)
To get in the mood for celebrating Jane Austen’s 250th, and because this delightful collection has been on my TBR shelf for a while, I thought now was the perfect time to start reading it and gain more insight into her life.
Teenage Writings by Jane Austen
Three notebooks of Jane Austen’s early writings survive. The pieces probably date from 1786 or 1787, around the time that Jane, aged 11 or 12, and her older sister and collaborator Cassandra left school. By this point Austen was already an indiscriminate and precocious reader, devouring pulp fiction and classic literature alike; what she read, she soon began to imitate and parody.
Unlike many teenage writings then and now, these are not secret or agonized confessions entrusted to a private journal and for the writer’s eyes alone. Rather, they are stories to be shared and admired by a named audience of family and friends. Devices and themes which appear subtly in Austen’s later fiction run riot openly and exuberantly across the teenage page. Drunkenness, brawling, sexual misbehavior, theft, and even murder prevail. It is as if Lydia Bennett is the narrator. (Credit: Oxford World’s Classics)
I also decided to reread Austen’s juvenilia. Reading her hilarious teenage writings truly shows not only how talented Austen was at a young age but also how imaginative and hilarious she was. I recommend to anyone who is a fan of Austen take the time to read her early writings. You see the many literary devices makes its way into her senior work.
A Gossip’s Story by Jane West
One of the most popular and prolific authors of her time, Jane West (1758-1852) enjoyed her greatest success with A Gossip’s Story, and A Legendary Tale (1796), one of the best-selling novels of its era. Yet in addition to its significance as a lost classic by a neglected woman writer, A Gossip’s Story has long been recognized by scholars as a likely influence on Jane Austen’s celebrated novel Sense and Sensibility (1811).
West’s wryly humorous cautionary tale – with its themes of courtship and love, money and romance, filial piety and financial ruin – centers on two very different sisters. Where Louisa proves herself to be rational and full of good sense, Marianne is driven by her emotions and romantic idealism, and their dispositions lead them to starkly different fates. (Credit: Valancourt Classics)
I started reading this one for an Austen book club that I am part of. You can see the possibility of Austen being inspired to write Sense and Sensibility, but also giving her similar ideas for her other works. The humor and similar writing style will be a real treat for any devout Austen fan.
What I Plan to Read Next:
Roar by Manjeet Mann
Rizu lives a comfortable life in the gated middle class suburbs of Delhi; her biggest worries are getting her homework done and keeping up with the mean girls at school. That is, until she’s accused of being a witch and the hysteria that follows triggers a chain reaction that ends in tragedy and life as she knew it changes forever.
Alone and fearing for her life, Rizu runs away and joins a group of pink sari wearing, stick wielding women, known for their revenge vigilantism. Together they can help Rizu take back her life and seek justice against those who wronged her.
Because sometimes you have to run through the streets and ROAR. (Credit: Penguin UK)
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney
Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more.
But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn’t a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase “pride and prejudice” came from Frances Burney’s second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn’t Romney—despite her training—ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen’s heroes—women writers who were erased from the Western canon—to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth—and recounts Romney’s experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen’s. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen’s bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favorite novels. (Credit: S&S/Marysue Rucci Books)
Hekate: The Witch by Nikita Gill
Hekate sings the story of its eponymous heroine. Born into a world on fire and at war, she and her mother are left behind by the menfolk of their Titan family as the battle against the new Gods-the Olympians-begins. Soon, Hekate and her mother are forced to flee their home as the Olympians overpower and enslave the Titans, including Hekate’s father, Perses, and gain dominion over the universe. In a bid to protect Hekate from the clutches of Zeus and Poseidon, her mother leaves her in the underworld with the goddess Styx and king of the underworld, Hades, where she must make a life for herself and discover her divine purpose.
Here begins Nikita Gill’s beautiful and propulsive reimagining of Hekate’s myth which unfolds into a coming-of-age adventure story and quest in which our young protagonist – not yet a goddess – sets out to discover what has happened to her parents, heal from the trauma of her separation from them, make a new home for herself in the underworld, and, eventually, step into her true power as a woman and goddess, before it’s too late. (Credit: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
Murder At The Christmas Emporium by Andreina Cordani
It’s Christmas Eve at the Emporium, a bespoke gift shop hidden in the depths of London’s winding streets, where a select few shoppers are browsing its handcrafted delights.
But when they go to leave, they find the doors are locked and it isn’t long before they realize this is no innocent mix-up. The shoppers have been trapped here by someone who knows their darkest secrets, someone will stop at nothing until they have all been unwrapped—and there is a gruesome gift waiting in Santa’s grotto . . .
For those that survive the night, it will be a Christmas to remember. (Credit: Pegasus Crime)
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