Mary Jane Hathaway

Persuasion, Captain Wentworth and Cracklin' Cornbread.

Yep, that's pretty much all I have to say---and you're hooked, right? I am totally in love with this Jane Austen Takes the South series by Mary Jane Hathaway. What an awesome idea.

This third book of the series finds Lucy Crawford, daughter of a well-respected and well-to-do Southern family fallen on hard times, struggling to find a way to keep the family from losing all they have to her father's debtors. When the local free clinic rents out a wing of the house, Lucy is shocked to find that the doctor in charge is her former love-interest, Jem.

Growing up, Jem's family was poor and redneck and Lucy's family once persuaded her to give him the boot when they found things were serious between them. Now that their paths have crossed again, well...you'll have to read it to find out!

I love this excellent retelling of Jane Austen's Persuasion. I may even love it more than Persuasion. At least the heroine isn't so depressed and mousy---Anne Elliott can be a real downer sometimes. The first thing I loved about the story was that the "traditional" race roles are reversed. Lucy's family is black and her family has been wealthy for generations. While this is surely a common scenario in real life, it's not one we see often in Southern fiction. I liked that. It was also fun to see the reference to the Bath festival I attended last year, as well as the BBC house tour my friend Katrina went on before our tour started.

It was refreshing to see romantic references that weren't contrived. They were touching and believable and the characters were likeable---or hateable!

Want to know something else that's awesome? The author lives not 30 minutes away from our old Oregon town! Those of you from the big city won't realize what a big deal that is, but since her town and my old town are pretty tiny, that's like finding out she lived just around the block from me! I think it's neat that she's writing about the South and living in Eastern Oregon, while I'm here living in the South and working on a manuscript set in---Eastern Oregon! Small world, this is!… (meer)