#CBR8 Book 117: "The Only Thing Worse Than Me is You" by Lily Anderson

Page count: 352 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Beatrice "Trixie" Watson has two goals for her senior year. She wants to save enough money to buy the collectible Doctor Who figurines at the local comics shop and she intends to knock her nemesis, Benedict "Ben" West down to fourth place in their fancy prep school ranking. The two have always had a tense and antagonistic relationship, going all the way back to when Ben caused Trixie to break her arm on the monkey bars during first grade. This year, she is determined to do everything it takes to crush him academically.

Ben and Trixie's friends, however, are less than thrilled about their decade-long rivalry, which only seems to be getting more mean-spirited with every year. When Trixie's best friend Harper starts dating Ben's best friend, Cornell, they are forced to spend more time in each other's company and their group of friends is adamant that they need to stop the constant sniping, as it's getting on everyone's nerves. Once they start actually talking civilly to one another, they discover that they share many geeky interests and possibly they don't need to savage each other verbally every chance they get.

As the school year proceeds, several students get accused of cheating, an unforgivable offence at a competitive school like Messina Academy for the Gifted. The group think little of it until one day, it seems these people may have been framed, by none other than Harper, who is immediately expelled. Cornell seems to abandon her and Trixie is furious. Will Ben pick Cornell's side or help Trixie investigate and clear Harper's name?

Back in July, Caitlin gave this book 5 stars over on the Cannonball group blog. A clever YA retelling of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, where all the various characters are nerds of all varieties attending a prestigious prep school? They are deeply opinionated about Firefly and Doctor Who (more on that later) and flirt about Saga. How could I not love this? While Caitlin said that all the nerdy references didn't work for her, they were part of what made me really get into the story. It really is so well done, and the modernised take on how Harper/Hero is ruined is much better than ZOMG! She may not be pure as the driven snow! of the original play and they don't actually have to fake anyone's death to resolve things, I was amused and happy throughout the story, with one notable exception.

Lily Anderson is a school librarian and has clearly spent a huge amount of time around teenagers. That much is clear. She's probably done quite a lot of research into the various fandoms she has her characters geek out about. She cannot, however, have spoken to anyone sane about Doctor Who, because in a moment that pretty much felt like a nails down the chalkboard, abrupt record scratch sort of an incident, she has her two main characters discussing their favourite Doctor Who episodes. Trixie claims her favourite episode is the Neil Gaiman-scripted The Doctor's Wife. As this is also my favourite, so far, so identifiable. Then Ben proceeds to say that no, his favourite episode is Nightmare in Silver (also scripted by Gaiman).

And I almost had to throw my e-reader across the room. I interrupted my focused Read-a-thon reading to rant loudly at my husband (the biggest Doctor Who fan I know) about this for some time, and it made me so sad, because up until that point, this book was well on its way to becoming a five star read. But no one in the history of ever who has actually watched the show and knows anything about how the episodes are recieved would have a character claim Nightmare in Silver was their favourite episode. It may have been written by Neil Gaiman, but it's also acknowledged by Gaiman himself, and Steven Moffat, the current showrunner, as a failure of execution and it's frequently rated as one of the least popular in the show's fifty year history in fan polls. As well as ranting to the husband about it, I posted about my outrage on Goodreads, and got support from others that this wasn't just a plotline choice that bothered me, but seemed baffling to others, as well.

I did stick with the book, although more filled with scepticism and distrust than before. The various twists and turns of the original play really are very well modernised and while I'm not entirely sure about the motivation of the person who is eventually revealed to be behind framing Harper, as I said, no one had to fake their death and there was a lot less judgemental virtue-shaming. The book clearly takes inspiration from great movies like Mean Girls and 10 Things I Hate About You. Even two months later, the complete failure on the author's part to properly research Doctor Who still upsets me, though. To someone less nerdy than me, this will probably not be such a big deal. If you like Shakespeare and/or cleverly written YA, give this book a try.

Judging a book by its cover: With two characters whose lives revolve around nerdy and geeky things and their weekly visits to the local comics shop, and who fall in love while discussing Saga, it seems very appropriate to have a cover evoking comic book panels. The leg up pose while kissing is possibly a bit cheesy, but I'll let it slide. Unlike that thing with Nightmare in Silver. Which is unforgivable!

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR8 Book 54: "Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride and Prejudice" by Curtis Sittenfeld

Page count: 512 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

I have mentioned more than once my immense fondness and love for the YouTube series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. I read the companion book about Lizzie, and the sequel of sorts, about Lydia. I was of the opinion that Pride and Prejudice had been modernised pretty successfully already. But as we have seen in the last few years with the many different iterations of Sherlock Holmes, in films, books and TV, a really good thing can inspire a lot of different interpretations.

Eligible is part of The Austen Project, which about 200 years after her death, pairs six contemporary fiction authors with the works of beloved Jane Austen, asking them to re-imagine them in a modern setting. Joanna Trollope has done Sense and Sensibility, Val McDermid has done Northanger Abbey, Alexander McCall Smith has done Emma, and Curtis Sittenfeld is tasked with giving us a contemporary literary twist on Jane and Lizzie (or Liz, as she's mostly referred to here), Bingley and Darcy. Set in Cincinnati, it has Jane being a yoga instructor trying to get pregnant with IVF, as she has yet to find a man she really likes; Elizabeth is a successful magazine columnist, conducting an affair with the married Jasper Wick; Mary is the eternal student, generally completely uninterested in any of her sisters' concerns; while Kitty and Lydia are cross-fit and paleo diet fanatics. Chip Bingley is a handsome ER doctor who recently participated in the popular reality show Eligible (think The Bachelor, you're clearly meant to), his ambitious sister Caroline is his manager and Fitzwilliam Darcy is his arrogant neurosurgeon friend, who can't seem to play well with others in a social setting.

The two eldest Bennet women (Jane is about to turn forty) move back home after their father has an accident and breaks his arm badly. It's clear that Mr. Bennet has badly mismanaged the family's finances, not helped by his oblivious wife, who relieves stress by shopping online and hoarding. Mrs. Bennet desperately wants one of her daughters to hit it off with Chip Bingley, and is delighted when he and Jane seem instantly smitten with one another. Liz, meanwhile, tries to get her father to understand that their huge childhood home needs to be cleaned, fixed up and put on the market. The three younger sisters need to leave the nest and fend for themselves, while the Bennet parents move into a more affordable apartment. Because Chip and Jane start dating, Liz frequently runs into Darcy, slowly beginning to wonder if their constant sniping is a sign of something else.

I'm not going to lie, I preferred The Lizzie Bennet Diaries to this, and just thought it was a lot more fun. The ways in which Sittenfeld manages to make the tale a lot more diverse in a number of different ways is cleverly done and I thought the inclusion of Ham was brilliant (although he is WAY too good for Lydia!). I thought the grand reveal of Mary's secret Tuesday night outings could have been revealed at a different point of the book than the very last chapter - it felt weird to have her get a tacked-on chapter at the very end, as an after-thought almost.

While it was a bit slow to start, I was fairly quickly drawn into the book, and due to the short chapters, I had devoured about two thirds of the book in one sitting, before realising that it really was quite late at night and I had things I needed to do the next day. So while there were parts of the book that dragged, and I really could have done without the spider infestation (!), I really did like the book and for people who haven't already discovered the YouTube series (what's wrong with you, don't you like awesome things?), it may even be the preferred version. I appreciated seeing the elder Bennet sisters as more mature and established women, but ultimately prefer grad student Lizzie.

Judging a book by its cover: What with this book being part of The Austen Project and published as serious contemporary fiction, I can only assume that the really boring cover is to assure people that while this book may be based on one of the most famous romances of all time, it's not actually a romance novel per se. It's perfectly acceptable intellectual reading, and as such, has a bland inoffensive cover. With a child's drawing of an expensive engagement ring pasted onto the cover for no good reason. Maybe the art director wanted to do a favour for their child/niece/nephew. Who knows? Romance novels have a lot of awful covers, but this is just boring and not particularly inviting. If I wasn't really curious about the Pride and Prejudice reimagining and had seen it favourable reviewed in  several places, I would never have picked up this book. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR8 Book 5: "The Epic Adventures of Lydia Bennet" by Kate Rorick and Rachel Kiley

Page count: 336 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Lydia Bennet became somewhat of an internet celebrity when her older sister Lizzie's vlogs, made as part of her graduate project, went viral in a major way. Always happy to be the centre of attention, Lydia made her own videos and loved the attention she got on YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr and other social media sites. Unfortunately, when she fell in love with and trusted a man who took terrible advantage of her, she also had to face her private life being open for all to see, and her name became synonymous with "that girl whose boyfriend tried to sell their sex tape to make money". Then her sister Lizzie's powerful boyfriend paid to have the whole ugly situation go away, and Lydia was left traumatised, humiliated and heart-broken.

Now Lydia is trying to rebuild her confidence and look to the future. Still living at home with her parents while her two older sisters have found love and moved to big cities, Lydia is completing summer courses at community college in preparation for transferring to San Francisco, where she'll study psychology and live with her taciturn Goth cousin Mary. Trying to re-build your life in a place where everyone is aware of who you are and what mistakes you've made isn't easy, though, and Lydia is so worried that everyone around her is just waiting for her to screw up again that she retreats back into the carefree party girl persona she used to be so comfortable with. All she needs to do to get accepted at the prestigious San Francisco university she wants to transfer into is write her application essay about a time when she experienced failure and what she learned from it. That shouldn't be too difficult, should it?

While Lydia's had to grow a lot since her first serious relationship crashed and burned extremely publicly, she's still has a lot of healing and maturing to do. Clearly feeling inadequate in comparison to both her sisters who are working in the fields they're most passionate about, Lydia is still not entirely sure what she wants to do with her life. While she likes the idea of studying psychology, she also has doubts and gets very insecure when she realises how many years the education is likely to take. She tries to cling to her old life while being impatient to move on to a new and better one, yet is uncertain and afraid of screwing up badly again. She's also struggling to rebuild the trust of one of her best friends, her cousin Mary, as well as her sisters and her parents.

The Epic Adventures of Lydia Bennet is a sequel to both the highly successful YouTube series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which re-imagined Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice for the 21st Century (which if you haven't watched - what are you doing with your life?) AND the book The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet, which gave us a lot of extra insight into protagonist Lizzie and further re-imagining of a lot of the scenes from the original novel that didn't appear in the series. In the Austen novel, Lydia is the obnoxious and oblivious flighty youngest sister who elopes with Mr Darcy's childhood friend and later nemesis, Mr. Wickham and seems quite happy to have ended up married to him.

In the modern re-imagining, Lydia may have started out similarly wild and irritating, but thanks in large part to the immense charm and skill with which actress Mary Kate Wiles portrayed her, Lydia grew to be a huge fan favourite and because the fate of Lydia Bennet of 200 years ago simply wouldn't work today, the show's writers took her story in a different direction. Running off with a man to whom you are not married wouldn't raise so much as an eyebrow in today's society, but being betrayed by your lover with the release of a sex tape would absolutely cause a stir similar to that of a Regency elopement. In both the book and the YouTube series, Mr. Darcy eventually comes through and sorts things out for the Bennet family in an attempt to make life easier for Lizzie, the woman he loves. In the YouTube series, however, Lizzie and Lydia tearfully begin to re-build their somewhat dysfunctional relationship in the aftermath of the tragedy and Lydia not trapped forever in a relationship with Wickham.

Kate Rorick and Rachel Kiley, two of the writers of the show, write in the acknowledgements that fans kept asking for Lydia's continued story and wanted to see that she had a chance at the same happy ending that her two sisters got. This book shows us what how Lydia's life progressed after the scandal that nearly ruined her life. There are appearances from Lizzie and Jane, but the most important supporting character is Mary, who in the YouTube re-imagining is the Bennet sisters' gloomy cousin, rather than their sister. Mary only appeared in a couple of episodes in the main YouTube series, but was quite prominent in Lydia's own videos (a spin-off of the main series). In this book she's working in a coffee shop off campus of the community college, waiting for Lydia to finish her courses so they can move to San Francisco together. She has a lovely sub-plot where she becomes the bassist of a local band, mainly through Lydia's machinations.

Having listened to the audio book of Pride and Prejudice at the end of last year and then read Jo Baker's Longbourn, it's interesting to have three very different versions of Lydia Bennet and her story in my head. The modern version is the only one I'd really be interested in reading more about, though, and I'm really glad that Rorick and Kiley decided to pen the continuing story of the youngest Bennet sisters, to give fans of the show an idea of what the future brings for her. It was absolutely nice to catch up with the older sisters and seeing where their lives had taken them, but getting more Lydia and Mary was more fun than I was expecting. Like in the series, Lydia occasionally really annoyed me and I kept wanting to shake her for some of the choices she was making, but slowly but surely, she figures out what she wants and who she wants to be, and in many ways, that was even more satisfying than her sister's Lizzie's development. Lydia's views on Dracula were also hilarious. Absolutely a worth-while book to pick up if you liked The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.