Thursday 28 May 2015

Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid- Review

Cat Morland is ready to grow up. A homeschooled minister’s daughter in the quaint, sheltered Piddle Valley in Dorset, she loses herself in novels and is sure there is a glamorous adventure awaiting her beyond the valley’s narrow horizon. So imagine her delight when the Allens, neighbors and friends of her parents, invite her to attend the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh as their guest. With a sunny personality, tickets every night and a few key wardrobe additions courtesy of Susie Allen, Cat quickly begins to take Edinburgh by storm and is taken into the bosom of the Thorpe family, particularly by eldest daughter Bella. And then there’s the handsome Henry Tilney, an up-and-coming lawyer whose family home is the beautiful and forbidding Northanger Abbey. Cat is entranced by Henry and his charming sister Eleanor, but she can’t help wondering if everything about them is as perfect as it seems. Or has she just been reading too many novels? A delectable, note-perfect modern update of the Jane Austen classic, Northanger Abbey tells a timeless story of innocence amid cynicism, the exquisite angst of young love, and the value of friendship.

Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid is a retelling of Austen's classic and is part of The Austen Project, which is where different authors are "updating" Jane's novels. I'm just going to state right off the bat that obviously this is nothing to the original, I enjoyed it and gave it 3 stars but I enjoyed Jane Austen's much more. With that off my chest on to the good and the bad (a few things bothered me about this books) of this book not Austen's!

First as materialistic as it is the cover is so striking! It is bright, bright orange with the silhouette of the abbey... I LOVE IT!

The one thing with the original that I struggled with was when Catherine was in Bath, I found it very slow but Val McDermid twist made it much more up my street. Having it set in Edinburgh during the book festival made it much more exciting with the bookish thing Cat got up to. Another thing done very well were the characters they were all so vivid. I felt we as readers got much more of the Tilney's in this purely because Cat did; society allowed. While on the subjects of the Tilney's I really liked Elinor and her relationship with Cat, also how her not being able to marry her beloved was changed into something much more empowering for the girls reading it. As for her brother, I adored Henry Tilney just as much as in the original. What I like about Henry is how is nice and sweet right from the start, there is no brooding or moodiness he's just fun and caring. Characters and their development are the most important thing for me when it comes to storytelling and it was done so well especially Cat's development!

However there are 3 things that really bugged me about this book unfortunately. The first may just be a personal thing. I get what I call secondary embarrassment, I get embarrassed for the character as if their mistakes are mine and it can be quite uncomfortable a times. I had this with Cath and her obsession with vampires and the like, I think it went just a little too far. The other two problems were to do with how the author tried to make it automatically modern. The social media, emails and the "teen speak" was just plonked in their with what seemed like very little thought or understanding and for me it just stuck out like a sore thumb. The last thing is that whenever someone updates a Jane Austen story they seem to have an incessant need to make a character gay or at least have someone think this. Now don't get me wrong I understand that people are gay and that is absolutely fine but I feel like using that and again just plonking it in there is wrong and irritating. In this particular book there was even some homophobic behaviour (trying to be vague here to avoid spoilers) which eventhough called out I don't know if I liked.

Overall the things that I didn't like are mainly small and I did really enjoy this book, it was fun, light and the characters were on point! Let me know your opinion if you've read it.
Speak soon,
Jade xx

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