I’ll let you sort out who is who! The male love interests play out well too. Lizzie, like Austen’s, is as spirited and outspoken as we would wish her to be, Jane as kind and accepting as ever, Mary/Meredith a fervent ecologist afraid of global warming and food additives, and Kitty/Katie and Lydia are now twins one wilder than Austen ever could have imagined, and the other unhappy because she is not. The five Bennet sister’s personalities and foibles are all updated cleverly.

Music room listening to Wagner at full volume instead of the quaint and quiet 19th-century pastime of reading. Bennet is still an unhappy bystander, but now resides in his Bennet is still as outrageously unrefined as ever, using her new money to social climb through Meryton’s better families. Bennet inherited a bundle from a third cousin. The most significant change is that the Bennet’s are wealthy – nouveau riche – since Mrs. There are plot changes, but half the fun is remembering the differences, and seeing her logic in updates. Rushton has been faithful to the original storyline, cleverly transferring the machinations of Regency courtship into the traumas of 21st-century teenage search for romance. The Bennet family always wanted to be well connected. Her teenage Lizzie Bennet and sisters are still hunting for beaus, but with all of the advantages of modern technology: mobile phones, laptop computers and blackberries. In her fourth book in the Jane Austen in the 21st-century series for young adult readers, (and some older adults who are forever young at heart), author Rosie Rushton tackles Jane Austen’s most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice, retelling the story with a contemporary twist.

Summer of Secrets by Rosie Rushton