Longbourn by Jo Baker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Editor's Pick
Unusually, this is one that I bought (some time ago) and is not part of of my Kindle Unlimited package. A bargain at £4.99 you can get it HERE.
A piece of fiction that is not only compelling, but well thought out and executed.
It focuses on a servant in the Bennet Household and mirrors from the point of view of the under stairs occupants what went on with Elizabeth and D'Arcy in Pride and Prejudice. Fair enough, this doesn't seem that exciting when one states the bare facts like that, but the skill and attention to detail that must have taken is second to none.
It is so well written, with both beautiful straightforward and complicated characters that I couldn't read it quick enough.
The production values were, as you would expect, really excellent. It's another's Editor's Pick from me. There were some highlights, one error and no bug bears for this one:
Location 532: 'kneeb-ritches'
Some of the highlights
Location 55: A definite highlight and a great example of how to weave words when describing the everyday detail in the hard life of a servant
'Over the eastern hills the sky was fading to a transparent indigo. Sarah, glancing up, hands stuffed into her armpits, her breath clouding the air, dreamed of the wild places beyond the horizon where it was already fully light, and of how, when her day was over, the sun would be shining on other places still, on the Barbadoes and Antigua and Jamaica where the dark men worked half-naked, and on the Americas where the Indians wore almost no clothes at all, and where there was consequently very little in the way of laundry, and how one day she would go there, and never have to wash other people's underthings again.'
Location 5290:
'It was not the end, of course; it was just an end. Mrs Hills thread may have become snarled up into an intractable knot, but others were still unspooling'
Location 5330:
'Threads that drift along will sometimes simply twine themselves together, without need for spindle or distaff: brought into each other's ambit, they bind themselves tight with the force of their own torsion. And this same torsion can, in the course of things, bundle the resulting cord back upon itself, ravelling it up into a skein, returning to the point of its beginning.'
'ambit' - the scope, extent or bounds of something.
Bibliography details:
Longbourn by Jo Baker
Kindle Edition, 448 pages / Published August 15th 2013 by Transworld Digital
Original Title Longbourn / ASIN B00CQ1D3BY / Edition Language English
Happy reading.
xoxox
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