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Book Review #45: Lovestruck (ARC) Title: Lovestruck Author: Kate Watson Genre: Young Adult/Fantasy Number of Pages: 300 Expected Publication: 2 April 2019…

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Review: Seeking Mansfield by Kate Watson

The only person who ever seems to notice Finley Price is her best friend, the Bertrams’ son Oliver. If she could just take Oliver's constant encouragement to heart and step out of the shadows, she'd finally chase her dream of joining the prestigious Mansfield Theater. When teen movie stars Emma and Harlan Crawford move next door to the Bertram's, they shake up Finley and Oliver's stable friendship. As Emma and Oliver grow closer, Harlan finds his attention shifting to the quiet, enigmatic, and thoroughly unimpressed Finley. Out of boredom, Harlan decides to make her fall in love with him. Problem is, the harder he seeks to win her, the harder he falls for her.

**I received a free ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.**

Seeking Mansfield is, somewhat unsurprisingly, a YA retelling of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Mansfield Park is, to many people, the worst Jane Austen novel – I actually wrote an essay on how much people dislike it, and why, at university. Fanny is moralistic and judgemental, and rarely witty, Edmund is just a bit of an idiot (the narrator rarely sides with him at all, and in fact calls out on being an idiot multiple times, as opposed to in Emma where Knightley and the narrator are practically the same person), Mary Crawford is arguably Elizabeth Bennett but without the narrator on her side, and many people think that Henry Crawford makes far more sense for Fanny than that idiot boy who only starts noticing her when it’s clear his current girlfriend is a bitch. Anne Bronte felt so strongly about the latter that she wrote The Tenant of Wildefell Hall, which is basically an Austen fanfic in which the Mansfield Park couples never ‘switch’.

Seeking Mansfield, however, takes this unpopular novel and reshapes it into a very compelling story. Fanny/Finley is given a complex backstory that explains some of her more ‘killjoy’ tendencies, as well as motivations that lie outside getting Edmund/Oliver to notice her. Oliver is given more attention by the narrator, meaning that we know his interest in Finley is far more meaningful and less hollow than the book is sometimes interpreted as. And both Mary/Emma and Henry/Harlan are also given an interesting treatment, one that tidies up the confusion that some people find in the original novel.

Things I liked about it:

Finley’s characterisation. Finley takes Fanny Price’s character – essentially a mouthpiece for moral judgement – and moulds it into something far more complex and sympathetic. Now the half-Brazilian daughter of a famous film star (now dead) and an alcoholic mother, Finley is a well-rounded female character, with aspirations driving her narrative that lie outside a romantic relationship. Her prudishness and caution – the traits that some reviled in Fanny – are shown to be the realistic products of past trauma and the subsequent impact on her mental health. Her love and care – feminine characteristics that are sometimes criticised in comparison to the more ‘masculine’ traits of heroines like Lizzie Bennett – are shown to be an active choice and source of strength, emphasising that there are multiple definitions of ‘strong’ women.

Harlan Crawford’s characterisation. Henry Crawford is a difficult character, whose charisma slightly outweighs Austen’s main message, that love cannot ‘change’ a bad boy into something else, for some. In Seeking Mansfield, Kate Watson takes these ideas and links them into modern day ideas surrounding consent – for instance, Harlan does seem to ‘love’ Finley, but he does outlandish things for her ‘as a friend’ that place in the hope to change their relationship status. When this works (as per the Austen plot), I felt a little uncomfortable, as it seemed to be endorsing the pressure placed on Finley by ‘nice guy’ Harlan to initiate a romance. But then at the end of the book the author completely calls Harlan out on it – he says that there’s ‘no way Finley can survive without him’ because of all the awesome things he has done for her, like helping her brother and helping her with her theatre aspirations. And Finley tells him to fuck off. GRADE A MODERN RETELLING.

Things I didn’t like about it:

The girl-on-girl hate. Admittedly, there is a lot less of this in Seeking Mansfield than there is in the source material – particularly as Mary/Emma Crawford is no longer demonised as someone who would dare touch Edmund/Oliver when it’s clear (but utterly unspoken) that Fanny/Finley likes him. I really liked the change in Emma Crawford that shows her as a slightly shallow, but not utterly malicious, character. But because of the character of Juliette (the adapted version of the Betram sister who Crawford elopes with), there was still a lot of girl-on-girl hate (judging Juliette for acting a certain way with her friends, for instance) and slut shaming, because that’s partly where the conflict of the original novel comes from. It stood out pretty clearly to me that Finley didn’t seem to have any particularly strong and positive female-female relationships in this book, with possibly the exception of Emma.

Overall rating: 4/5