Saturday, February 20, 2010

A Bestseller

I was pleasantly surprised today while scrolling through Kindle's bestsellers to see that a number of my novels make the top 100. Granted the books are free although you can pay for copies as well, but with all the e-books available it amazing that my novels still resonate with people. Pride and Prejudice is the top seller of my novels, which comes as little surprise. But Northanger Abbey makes the list and Mansfield Park does not. This I find interesting because NA is a bit of a black sheep or at least not as well loved as the others. It is a mistake though since many of my favorite lines come from this particular novel and I think Henry Tilney is quite the dark horse as a hero. So if you have a Kindle or feel like downloading Kindle for your PC or Mac for free do so and revisit some classics at an incredibly affordable price. As for myself I just downloaded The Count of Monte Cristo and yes, I will be picturing a delicious Jim Cavezel as Edmund.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Longbourn's Unexpected Matchmaker

I know some people have been waiting for this post. Well wait no longer. Today I'd like to talk about Emma Hox's book "Longbourn's Unexpected Matchmaker". This book is Pride & Prejudice revisionism. Normally I have issues with P & P revisionism. I don't understand why you mess with perfect story like P & P, but there have been some exceptions and one of them is definitely Ms. Hox's novel.

I have spoken before about how everyone turns P & P into an extreme drama. There are rapes and murders and kidnappings and who knows what else. This is very un-me or un-JA. I wrote about people and about their lives. Great characters and Ms. Hox stays true to them, which I like. The story unfolds and there are some Lydia elopes moments, but love triumphs.

I bought this book for my kindle and will say one part I did not enjoy were some of the typos. Now this is not something that happens in Ms. Hox's book alone. I have read many Kindle books with typos where there were not typos in the print copy. I am not sure why this happens, but at times it took away from my enjoyment of the novel. Hopefully subsequent editions will have this fixed.

There were some surprises in Matchmaker, but I will not ruin them for you. I'll let you read the book yourself, which I highly recommend you do.

As a side note, I do hope Ms. Hox writes more. I'd like to see a few other revisionisms besides just P & P or see how she handles a sequel. I'm dying to know what fate befalls Georgiana. So far I have only read one sequel where I like what happened to Georgiana and that was "Conviction" by Skylar Hamilton-Burris.