Alys and her four sisters are attending the biggest wedding of the year, and their mother, Mrs. Binat, is hoping that they will catch the eye of rich bachelors. Alys is not interested in hunting for a husband, until she meets the handsome Valentine Darsee.

I had high expectations for this retelling of Pride and Prejudice, especially because I was lucky enough to meet the author once, and had a lovely conversation with her about Jane Austen.

However, I was disappointed in several areas, and ending up giving up on the book at page 49. I really tried to keep going, but this book is just not at all my cup of tea.

First of all, the Binat family are so mean to each other! They were seriously rude and insulting to each other. I know that the Bennets in P&P sort of annoy each other, and the sisters squabble a little, but they are mostly polite to each other. But in this book, the Binats are outright horrible to each other. That just hurt my heart.
The Kitty character is fat, and Lydia calls her 'hippo' and 'hog' and all sorts of awful names. Mrs. Binat basically tells her husband that she wishes she hadn't married him because now he is poor. Everybody is so mean! That made me sad.

There are a lot of crass references to sex. A lot. So vulgar and gross.
Then Alys and Sherry sneak out to secretly smoke cigarettes in the graveyard. Ew.
Alys seems to have very liberal moral views, and she makes fun of people with religious faith or conservative morality as being old-fashioned or ignorant. She tries to teach her students that they should disobey their parents. She curses in the classroom, and the principal has to reprimand her for profanity.

Wow. Just so many things that I did not like, which do not align with my own moral worldview or Jane Austen's. Not at all what I expected from this book. I wanted elegance and romance, not this vulgar stuff.


Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book in exchange for a free and honest review. All the opinions stated here are my own true thoughts, and are not influenced by anyone.

This book gives a lot of details about the author's writing workshop with his students, examples of their work, and how he advised them to edit and revise their memoirs. It includes a lot of writing prompts and writing exercises that the reader can use as well.

I did not find anything useful in this book. It's too long, too convoluted, and I didn't care about reading the lengthy excerpts from his writing students. I quit reading after page 81. The author just takes forever to get to the point. He went off on this rabbit trail about traditional essays that was excessively boring.

The writing is also crass in some places. There are a lot of vulgar jokes and innuendos, not only in the excerpts from the students but also from the author themselves. It's so out of place for this type of book and served no purpose.

I made it to page 13 and had to DNF it because of all the strong profanity. I wasn't enjoying the story anyway. It is told from three different characters POVs, and that felt like it was too much head-hopping for me. The characters were over-thinking everything to an excruciating degree that just annoyed me. Every little thing in every second had to be scrutinized from three different perspectives. Too much.

Voran meets a mysterious Pilgrim while on a hunt for the white stag, and is sent on a quest to save his country. There is magic in the song of a Sirin that could heal his nation, but at a terrible cost.

I only read through page 85 of this book and then DNF'd it. I just wasn't in the mood to continue, and I've seen in other reviews that it gets really violent later on. Not my cup of tea.

The writing was very dense. Every scene had the same dramatic intensity, even if the characters were doing something simple like eating breakfast. Everything has a secret symbolism. A loaf of bread can't just be a simple loaf of bread; it has to have a deeper meaning. After awhile, that constant symbolism became oppressive. I felt like I had to remember every little detail, because it might be important later on.

I did not connect with the characters. They have interesting personalities, and it looked like there was some good setup for character development later in the story. But somehow I just didn't care about them.

The world building is very rich and imaginative. You can really feel the weight of history in Voran's country. Part of the story is about how the people have forgotten their true heritage, and the song of the Sirin should help them rediscover their national heritage again. However, it felt like too much information all at once. I couldn't keep track of all the symbolic beliefs and rituals and historic monuments. Once again, it became oppressive.

I think other people might like this book better. I just wasn't in the mood for such a dense story.

Roxy lives in the Umbrella house where her grandmother first began to live as a squatter who gained rights over the property in a co-op after the legal owners tried to evict the squatters. She and her best friend want to do a news story about a graffiti artist who vandalizes buildings without permission but whose work is considered legitimate art. The big bad conglomerate is buying up properties in the area and evicting tenants, and Roxy worries that they might try to take away her beloved home.

I didn't finish this book. I read the first forty pages and realized that the moral premise of the book doesn't quite align with my own moral compass. I think I would have just been annoyed with the moral perspective in this book. Any other time I might have continued to read anyway and been interested to explore someone else's perspective. However, I started reading this while I had a toothache, and I just wasn't in the mood for all the moral gray areas.