By the Book by Julia Sonneborn

Narrated by Amy McFadden

By the Book is a loose modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Because I am a Philistine, I have not read any Austen, but I have seen the various movie versions so I know the basic story.

Anne Corey is a professor of English literature at Fairfax College, a small liberal arts college in California. She is stuck in the “publish or perish” zone and has to have a book contract by January (that is, she has about six months) to secure her ongoing employment.

Fairfax has just appointed a new President – Adam Martinez. Adam and Anne went to college together around 10 years earlier and they were once engaged. They broke up and Anne has not seen him since. So it is with some trepidation that she meets him again at a welcoming event. She is sorry for the way they broke up and thinks it is her fault. She wonders how Adam is doing now and whether he’s married or single, etc. But he is stiff and standoffish with her at the reception and, according to her BFF, Larry, a fellow professor at the college, Adam didn’t even seem to recognise her.

Adam is of course the Captain Wentworth character. I have a lot of time for Captain Wentworth so I was hoping to spend a lot of time with him. Unfortunately, I did not get to. Much of the story is taken up by Anne’s academic woes and her quest for a book contract, as well as a fraught romantic relationship between Larry and a married, closeted, actor.

But the worst thing was that for almost all of the book, Anne was in a relationship with Rick Chasen – a Wickham-like character straight out of Pride & Prejudice (ie, the wrong book so I was a little confused). Thankfully there wasn’t on-page sex so I didn’t have to listen to explicit detail of Anne sleeping with the wrong man but it was bad enough that I knew she was doing so. Particularly because it was so obvious that Rick was a jerk. Anne is supposed to be a scholar of great women writers of the 19^th Century. Austen is her bailiwick. How could she not notice he was basically Wickham? It was beyond belief that she would not know this. I didn’t understand why she would disbelieve Adam’s warning to her that Chasen was not a good guy when she only knew Adam as a person of integrity. Why believe some guy she’s just met over a man she spent years with and was once going to marry? In Pride & Prejudice it makes more sense because Darcy and Wickham are both fairly new to Elizabeth’s acquaintance, so there is no history there and, Darcy and Elizabeth don’t get along. But Wickham doesn’t fit so easily into a Persuasion story. I did ask on Twitter about this to make sure I wasn’t remembering the story incorrectly and I’m told that William Elliot is someone from Persuasion who courts Anne but by whom Anne is not taken in. It just did not fit well for Anne Corey’s character to not see right through Rick Chasen.

Of course, in Persuasion the romance is mostly seemingly-unrequited longing looks and angst until the end and the same holds true here. It is only right at the finale that there is any actual romance between Adam and Anne. And that made me sad because there was just not enough h/h time for me.

I found the book difficult to get into. I was bored at the beginning. It took until well over halfway before I was engaged with the story at all really. And I wanted far more of Adam than I got and way (waaaaaaaay) less of Rick Chasen.

The narration, by Amy McFadden, was solid. I liked the mild Spanish accent she used for Adam, who was born in Guatemala. I can’t say for sure it was authentic but it was pleasing to my ear and definitely not a caricature. (In fact, one of the things I did like about this modern version of the story was that the Captain Wentworth character is brown and came to America as a child, undocumented.) When Adam speaks words of Spanish here and there the accent was much more pronounced and hearing him say “besos” was a bit swoonworthy actually.

Rick Chasen is from Britain so Ms. McFadden got to do a toffy British accent too. It worked well and I’d have enjoyed it more if I didn’t wish Rick would disappear every time he turned up in the story.

I expect the narration was probably what had me as engaged in the book as I eventually was. Ms. McFadden had a variety of character voices and good intonation and emotion in the more intense scenes. There was even one bit where I was brought to tears. I am a softie though.

I don’t really know if people who enjoyed Persuasion would like By the Book. On the one hand, they might because the thing I most disliked was that there wasn’t enough h/h time and that is probably true to the original. On the other, they might not because of Wickham/Chasen character.

As for me, I think I’ll mostly stick to movies when it comes to Austen or Austen retellings.

Kaetrin