“Take a Peek” book reviews are short and (possibly) sweet, keeping the commentary brief and providing a little peek at what the book’s about and what I thought.
Synopsis:
(via Goodreads)
An English professor struggling for tenure discovers that her ex-fiancé has just become the president of her college—and her new boss—in this whip-smart modern retelling of Jane Austen’s classic Persuasion.
Anne Corey is about to get schooled.
An English professor in California, she’s determined to score a position on the coveted tenure track at her college. All she’s got to do is get a book deal, snag a promotion, and boom! She’s in. But then Adam Martinez—her first love and ex-fiancé—shows up as the college’s new president.
Anne should be able to keep herself distracted. After all, she’s got a book to write, an aging father to take care of, and a new romance developing with the college’s insanely hot writer-in-residence. But no matter where she turns, there’s Adam, as smart and sexy as ever. As the school year advances and her long-buried feelings begin to resurface, Anne begins to wonder whether she just might get a second chance at love.
Funny, smart, and full of heart, this modern ode to Jane Austen’s classic explores what happens when we run into the demons of our past…and when they turn out not to be so bad, after all.
My Thoughts:
Hmm. I tore through By the Book, and definitely had a good time while I was reading it. At the same time, for a book being billed as a retelling of Persuasion, it’s pretty loose when it comes to making the plot stick.
Anne spends much of the book in a relationship with a smarmy writer who drops lines about being on the front lines in Fallujah and his battle-related PTSD, but it’s just so clear from the get-go that he’s a con artist and a fraud. When Adam makes a comment to Anne about Rick’s shady past, I couldn’t help but wonder how Darcy and Wickham sneaked into Persuasion! Anne is a decent protagonist, a smart woman who’s chose her professional career over love (although the history of her break-up with Adam on the eve of their college graduation didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.) Of course, as a retelling, the ending is inevitable — but if I didn’t know Persuasion, I wouldn’t have been convinced that Anne had actually been mooning over Adam and regretting their break-up the whole time. When they do finally declare their love, it’s about as out of the blue as it gets.
Still, I wouldn’t want to imply that this isn’t a fun read. Anne’s best friend Larry is a hoot, even if his romantic indulgences are ill-advised. The big blockbuster movie that’s all the rage is called Jane Vampire (a supernatural version of Jane Eyre, of course), and it becomes a pretty silly recurring subject throughout the book. Anne’s family life is messy and has a realistic ring to it, and I enjoyed seeing campus life through a professor’s eyes, showing that behind the intellectual, scholarly facades are real people, looking for love and friendship and just a little bit of fun once in a while.
Don’t expect anything too deep, and don’t expect an Austen retelling that’s particularly attached to the original — but given those caveats, By the Book is an entertaining, funny, and even charming read.
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The details:
Title: By the Book
Author: Julia Sonneborn
Publisher: Gallery Books
Publication date: February 6, 2018
Length: 384 pages
Genre: Contemporary fiction
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley
Bookshelf Fantasies 