Here’s how I would break down 2014: BDF and ADF. That’s Before Diana Peterfreund (January – June), and After Diana Peterfreund (July- today). Back in July, while shopping for books to bring on vacation, my favorite book-seller recommended For Darkness Shows the Stars to me. She promised I would like it, and I was helping support a local author, so I picked it up AND IT WAS AWESOME. A futuristic, dystopian re-telling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, I ate it up and told everyone I knew about […]
What if the Scarlet Pimpernel were a teenage girl in a dystopian future?
4.5 stars Set in a different part of the same post-apocalyptic world as For Darkness Shows the Stars, this book is more of a companion novel than a sequel. The two islands of New Pacifica are Albion (think a futuristic pacific islander England) and Galatea (sci-fi revolutionary France). In Albion they have democracy and happily genetically alter their bodies to be their very best selves. Princess Isla is the regent of Albion until her toddler brother comes of age, because while they are big on genetic engineering, […]
Science fiction young adult Jane Austen. It’s good, I promise
Laziness makes me resort to the Goodreads synopsis once again: It’s been several generations since a genetic experiment gone wrong caused the Reduction, decimating humanity and giving rise to a Luddite nobility who outlawed most technology. Elliot North has always known her place in the world. Four years ago Elliot refused to run away with her childhood sweetheart, the servant Kai, choosing duty to her family’s estate over love. Since then the world has changed: a new class of Post-Reductionists are jumpstarting the wheel of […]
Who run the world? Girls.
Rarely have I felt like fist-pumping a book while I was reading it. But then, I had never read Diana Peterfreund before. I fell in love with For Darkness Shows the Stars and then realized that there was a companion novel. I was so excited. Across a Star-Swept Sea is not a direct sequel, but it involves the same world and even has a few cross-over characters (I won’t say anymore–it would spoil the surprise). This time, Peterfreund draws from the Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel. […]
I’m Team Wentworth
Jane Austen is a big player in the Cannonball world. We love her books and her movies, and we can’t stop ourselves from reading stories based on her work. Sometimes (Bridget Jones, Clueless, Bride & Prejudice), the new stories and movies that are based on her stuff are fun and worthy of a comparison to the original. And sometimes (Austenland, Death Comes to Pemberley, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), they aren’t great, but we don’t mind that much, because we love the original so much. […]
Persis Blake is my new hero
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