Flora: there’s two lotus flowers on the cover of this book, which made me realize that the main heroine’s hair was short the entire time–not super common for romance novels, will give it that!
I do not understand why I keep reading these books, I clearly do not like them. And every time I read them I get grumpy that this is likely The Indian Retelling of Jane Austen’s oeuvre, at least for a number of years. You don’t see Jane Austen and Werewolves anywhere, do you?
Wait don’t answer that.
In any case, here we have a retelling of Sense and Sensibility, with all the requisite modern twists that bring Austen into the 2020s. As before, our story centers on the Raje family, an expansive cast of characters that includes a prince, a psychic, and a physician. The stories do build on one another, sort of, but you don’t need to have read any of the prior books to know what’s going on–you’ll get plenty of reminders/information about who’s who (Ashna is a chef who owns Curried Dreams, from the prior installment which was a retelling of Persuasion).
In any case, I find the whole conceit a bit overblown. Usually when you have interlocking characters like this, it’s in a romance series to get you to tune into the next installment. There’s already a hook here, though! Austen! The writing remains a bit stiff and show don’t tell, and some of the internal monologuing is a bit tedious as well. I usually find myself rushing through to get to the parts that I know are coming, and I do find it interesting to see how the plot points are going to be modernized to keep their relevance in a quite different world from the one Ms. Austen lived in
