I don't know what magical sacrifice I made to find the first five star fiction book of the year, but I'd have paid any price! Pride and Prejudice is not my favourite Austen novel - I consider the book and its various adaptations to be a sort of primer - but Melinda Traub has chosen one of the most annoying characters from the original and created a magical masterpiece. I now love Lydia, find Wickham devishly charming and wish I could teach my cat to talk.

Born the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter - there is some crafty and muddled retconning of the Bennet daughters which, yes, made my head ache - Lydia Bennet is overlooked by her parents and ignored by her surviving sisters, beautiful Jane, clever Lizzy and boring Mary, until she creates a younger sister of her own - from the family cat. Kitty is not only her sister's partner in crime, she is also Lydia's familiar, because the brattiest Bennet sister is a witch.

Lydia is asked write 'an account of her experiences' to an unnamed correspondent, which the garrulous teen translates into laboriously writing out her entire life history: 'I shall fill these quires of paper till the last page and then stop—even if that leaves off in the middle of the Battle of Brighton. That would serve you right,' she warns. We get Lydia's life at Longbourn, from the creation of Kitty to matchmaking Mary with Mr Collins, to her elopement with Wickham at Brighton - but from her own perspective, with a great deal of misdirection and magic missing from Austen's novel. Lydia's sisterhood of witches include Colonel Forster's young wife and Miss Lambe from Sanditon, an heiress from the Caribbean. While recounting her bid to save Kitty's life from a powerful demon named Wormenheart, who is also Wickham's father (makes sense, right?), Lydia is caught up in another battle to save a soul - that of Georgiana Darcy, a mathematical genius who has been cursed. All the while, she must fight her attraction to Wickham, who courtship takes the form of devouring Lydia's soul.

This all sounds completely mad and completely un-Austen-like, but that is the brilliance of Taub's take on the Regency classic - Lydia's narrative voice is hilarious and very in character and the plot wonderfully captivating (even though the 'Jewel of Propriety' was obvious). I started reading and couldn't stop! This isn't a plodding retelling of the original with magic shoehorned in, although the story does follow the bones of the original plot, but a fresh and funny reimaging of a neglected supporting character/literary device, who comes to life apart from her perfect older sister. I also enjoyed Lydia's take on her family, from Lizzy, who changed her mind about Darcy 'after seeing the extent of his estates', and her parents' marriage: [their] 'situation was a bit like eternally picnicking at the edge of a crumbling cliff. My father’s favourite pastime was mocking my mother’s fear of falling.'

I can't recommend this witty, wiccan take on Austen enough, even for P+P fangirls - in Lydia's words, 'Remember, always, not to judge people too hastily, for everyone is living out a story of their own, and you only get to read the pages you appear on.' ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2023/09/2023127-scandalous-confessions-of-lydia.h... ( )

The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch is a retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from Lydia's point of view.

To be honest I'm always a bit afraid of retellings, reimagined and parallel classics. To me after a certain time the classic, while fictional, is that character's truth, their history and in my mind I don't want someone to rip it all apart. The addition of witches, familiars, demons and magic did change the story some but at it's heart Melinda Taub did a wonderful job of keeping the original Pride and Prejudice threads recognizable.

Whether you liked Lydia in the original or not, she has been given a chance to tell her version of what happened.

Thank-you to Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for my honest review.

#TheScandalousConfessionsofLydiaBennetWitch #NetGalley ( )