Customer Reviews

Lions and Liquorice

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What a delicious book! A role-reversed spoof of Pride and Prejudice that has at least three levels of parody (there may be more that I missed), it is witty, sexy, and altogether fun to read. I hope that Kate Fenton's books are more widely published in the US in the future.

This is Pride and Prejudice in drag. This modern adaption is lots of fun with swears and sex that Jane Austen would pale.

The main characters are John (aka Jane) who is a stoic Anglo-Saxon widower whose pregnant wife Sally was run over by a lorry.

There is Nick Bevan (aka Lizzy) a writer and brother-in-law to John who does not have the success as a writer he had as a journalist.

There is Mary Dance (aka Mr. Darcy) who is a bold and brash American who can't help but fall in love with the Welsh, Nick Bevan.

Their courtship is tumultous and their recovery is interuppted by his son Chris (aka Lydia but with more brains) who has gone to Banghkok(sp?) with Sasha (aka Wickham) who instead of ravishing the seventeen year old (which he probably dearly wants) she plans on using him as a mule.

This P&P modern adaptation is loads of fun.

"Lions and Liquorice" is basically a modern adaptation of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" with a few curve balls thrown in along the way. It is a must read for any "Pride and Prejudice" fanatics or someone who must know the gist of the original story, but can't quite get it.

Author Kate Fenton has written a charming and entertaining reworking of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which both implicitly and explicitly draws from one of the Western world's most beloved novels. Llewellyn Bevan is a Welshman who used to be a London journalist but has forsaken the glam busy world for the serenity of the North Yorkshire country while he writes fiction. Lo and behold, a BBC-like production company comes to town to shoot scenes for a new adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. As troupe and townspeople mingle, relationships blossom, wilt, get stomped upon and rebound in much the same way as those of the Bennett sisters. Though gender and power shifts show the author hasn't tried to replicate the original story in toto, there is enough similarity between the stories to keep one interested in that regard.

The characters are interesting and three-dimensional, even minor players, and the dialogue is very good. The plot is of a lively construction, quite entertaining, and the ending is satisfying. I would give the book a 4+/5- if I could because the writing is sometimes choppy and awkward, and there are WAY too many colloquialisms and references for a Yank such as myself, but this is a UK edition so the detraction on that score is not altogether fair. (BTW, what's a Taff?)

I thoroughly enjoyed this book from start to finish and suspect, if you like Jane Austen, that you will too.

I found this book,a UK edition, written almost 20 years ago, in a book sale. Seeing that it is a take-off on Pride and Prejudice, I snapped it up and read it recently. What a fun reversal of roles and on many levels, very well done twist on the plot of P&P. It is written as contemporary UK chick lit with lots of British idioms, which made it even more entertaining.