On the whole, this is one of the better among the many Austen variations out there -- or perhaps I should say two of the better Austen variations. Because the book shifts back and forth between the perspectives (and the stories) of Harriet Smith and Jane Fairfax.
The reading of neither is improved by this. Just as you're getting settled into one story, you're jerked out of it and sent off to read the other, sometimes for as much as a dozen chapters, before being readmitted to the one you'd originally begun. In addition, there doesn't seem to be any reason to connect the two. The heroines are very different people; the tales almost completely separate, with nothing from one to influence or alter the other except what comes from Jane Austen's original Emma.
As far as I can tell, the only reason why the author combined the two books was that she wanted to write the Harriet novel but couldn't resist Jane Fairfax, Austen's most melodramatic heroine. And I'm glad she wrote the Fairfax story, because although it doesn't have a twist to distinguish it from the original story as it was told in Emma, it's still always a lot of fun to read from Jane's perspective, and this interpretation of her was done rather well.
I just wish she'd made a separate book out of Jane's story, and confined this one to Harriet's, because the twists in *that* book are interesting enough not to make me want to leave them alone for the myriad interruptions of Jane's. If I could have read these in succession rather than at the same time, I would have been delighted by the Harriet story and well enough pleased by the Jane story, but together they are both somewhat weakened.
The style is not Austenesque and doesn't try to be, but I didn't see any of the glaring modernisms that show up in too many of the badly written Austen variations out there. ("Okay" is the one I hate most -- in the mouth of a Regency heroine!! Thankfully, there's none of that here.)
The twists are very simple and leave the story mostly untouched -- only the viewpoint and the viewpoint character's internal thoughts change with them, for the most part. After the number of Austen variations I've seen in which the twists that alter the story from the original are so extreme as to leave virtually nothing of the original story to work with (for example, Elizabeth Bennet goes to London to run a bookstore, or somebody gets knocked on the head and developed amnesia) it was frankly a delight to see an idea so straightforward that I'm surprised nobody came up with it before: what if Harriet Smith wasn't the blithe little brainless beauty she's portrayed as in Emma? What if she was simply smart enough to keep her intelligence under wraps, knowing that Emma would not like to be upstaged?
What, in short, if she were manipulating Emma deliberately from square one?
This could have led to a really unlikeable character, but it mostly didn't... because we are inclined to agree with her view of Emma herself, and therefore why that sort of flattery was necessary, and because Harriet improves gradually over the course of the book. Her relationships with Robert Martin, and with Mr. Knightley, likewise develop slowly and naturally, and reach the eventual change in her feelings without seeming too forced.
I liked the name-dropping from Mansfield Park -- including the Rushworths and Crawfords as minor characters (primarily in the Jane story) was fun.
In general, while I had very minor criticisms of the story which I'll leave out because they'd require spoiler warnings to explain, my only really significant objection was the combining of these two stories into one. Why on earth didn't the author write these two books individually? There's nothing that says you can't write two different Emma variants in one lifetime?
I hope she'll consider publishing them separately someday, as individual novels. But for now, it's pleasant reading anyway, if you can accept that you will have to switch back and forth frequently between the two.
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