Haven't had much free time to read this week, but finished up a few more library books that are due soon:
Jane and the Damned, an Austen-derivative novel by
Janet Mullany, with Jane Austen as a
vampire one of the Damnèd secretly fending off French soldiers during a Napoleonic takeover of coastal England. I kind of want to compare it to the other Austen-derivative where she's a vampire who's experienced writer's block for two centuries and is deeply annoyed at all those newcomers making money from shoddy spinoffs of her works and decides to take matters into her own fangs.
Frankly seemed kind of pointless, because it was full of Our Vampires Are Different (okay with sunlight, religious symbols, need not kill for blood, can turn invisible and communicate psychically, mere skin touch is intoxicate to humans, vampirism is reversible; I'm amazed they didn't sparkle) and everything is reset to the status quo at the end, only Jane now has direct models upon which to base Darcy (he's even named William
), Wickham, and the Bingley sister/Lady Catherine.
Why people who write these things can't give Austen enough credit for inventing her own characters, or at least using ones that didn't come from P&P, I don't know. The actual writing is okay and the story flows well enough, it's just that for something that says on the cover "It's more than her wit that's biting", this was really rather dull.
A far
better and more interesting novel is implied by the alternate title suggestion given in the dedication,
Austen Powers.
Seriously, the Regency was a time of relative sexual license, silly self-indulgence, and Napoleonic War paranoia with back and forth spying. It was practically the 60s of the 19th century and I'd far rather have read about
Jane Austen: International Gentlewoman of Mystery than
Jane Austen: Vampyre. Pride-adelic!
Also "read"
Troublemaker: Part One, an original graphic novel written by comedy mystery author
Janet Evanovich in conjunction with her daughter
Alex Evanovich and artist
Joëlle Jones.
This is part of the Alex Barnaby series by Evanovich
mère which I keep meaning to read and it was a cutely cartoony adventure that had some funny points and a mildly entertaining mystery that ends at a decent to-be-continued point.
Very light and fluffily jokey, but fun enough that I'll track down the regular prose series this is based upon. From the library, of course, because it's HarperCollins and they deserve to have their non-expiring library use upped after the stunt they're trying to pull.