Happy Friday, all!

The stand out read of this week for me was Catherine Cliff’s Miss Bates, an Emma retelling.  I picked up this book with some trepidation (okay, a great deal of trepidation).  I’m always wary of Austen retellings, for all sorts of reasons, and when it comes to this particular Austen novel, I have always been strongly Team Emma.  But it was recommended to me by Danielle Parker of Club Calvi and I trust Danielle’s taste, so I decided to take the plunge– and I’m so glad I did.  I’ve been running around telling everyone I know to read it.  It’s Emma as you’ve never seen it before, and it’s a sign of how incredibly compelling this book is that even though this is the anti-Emma (Emma is monstrous in this), I loved it anyway.  So go read it and tell me what you think!

As a companion read, I recommend Rachel Parris’s Introducing Mrs. Collins, another recent Austen retelling which didn’t make me twitch.  (Should that be a whole category?  Non twitch-making Austen retellings?)   This one centers Charlotte Lucas at the heart of her own story.  It’s gentler and less dark than Miss Bates, but also does lovely work taking the side characters of whom Austen made short shrift and presenting them in more nuanced ways.  (Even Mr. Collins isn’t entirely unsympathetic here.)

After that it was back to Mrs. Malory’s Taviscombe with Mrs. Malory and a Necessary End, in which a stint filling in for a friend in the local charity shop presents Mrs. Malory with a corpse as well as used items to sort.  Due to the title, I had been laboring under the misconception that this was the last in the series, but the necessary end referred to the corpse and not the books, so I still have one more left to go….  And after that, I’ll need suggestions for more vintage, long-running mystery series!

What have you been reading this week?