All the Things I Know by Audrey Ryan - Blog Tour ,Guest Post and Giveaway

Today I'm happy to be welcoming Audrey Ryan here with a character interview from her new book, All the Things I Know. This is a young adult book which transports Pride & Prejudice to modern-day Seattle. I'll share the book description and then hand over to Audrey.

Finding Favor by Lana Long

To celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of Mansfield Park each month I’ve been trying to read something inspired by Mansfield Park. ‘Finding Favor’ by Lana Long is a young adult modernisation of the book.

17 year old orphan Favor Miller has lived with the Brown family for the last 8 years. Mr Brown was a college friend of Favor’s father. Favor doesn’t remember much of her family, so her most highly-prized possessions are journals belonging to her father and grandfather which she reads in times of distress to feel close to them. Although Favor lives with the Browns she isn’t really part of the family on an emotional level. When Mrs Brown spends time with her daughter, Madison, Favor is not invited to join them. There are two Brown sons, Tom, the party-boy elder son, and younger son Ethan, the Edmund character, who is Favor’s closest friend. Favor adores Ethan and secretly hopes for a romantic relationship between them one day.

As it nears Favor’s eighteenth birthday she is summoned to Mr Brown’s office, He wants her to sign a contract. It’s not really legally enforceable but more of a moral agreement. He will provide her with college tuition and arrange an internship which will greatly assist Favor in her desired career of horticulture. In return, she will comport herself in such a way that doesn’t embarrass the Brown family and she will also back off from her relationship with Ethan so he has a chance to forge new relationships that will be of benefit when he goes to work for his father’s company. Favor is devastated by this. Firstly, it shows how little the Browns have accepted her into their family, after all this time. She knows that Mr Brown has contacts that could seriously affect her future career prospects too, but the thing that really upsets Favor is the thought of having to give up Ethan. To cope with the day to day slights of being only tolerated rather than loved and the bullying she receives from Madison, Favor has purposely withdrawn – she has very few friends aside from Ethan, so he has become her whole world.

'My parents died and I'd accepted it. I lived a quasi-life, trapped by the Brown rules and expectations, and I'd accepted that. If I accepted those things so easily why was I struggling to accept that I'd never be with Ethan? 

But then again, I'd never really accepted those other things either. I'd just buried them. And now the graveyard of suppressed emotions threatened to overflow.'

One of the Brown’s neighbours has some visitors coming to stay – brother and sister Henry and Mary Crawford. In no time at all Ethan is under Mary’s thumb, and Favor faces having to lose him whether she signs the contract or not.

Mr and Mrs Brown, like Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park, are not hands-on parents. He works almost constantly, and is a controlling authority figure rather than a loving dad, and Mrs Brown is often mentally absent even if she’s usually physically there. She is often staring at her smartphone rather than engaging with her children. Favor is not treated the same as the Brown children, she is staying with them long-term rather than being a member of the family.

I had mixed feelings on this book, as there were things about it that I thought were really good and other things I wasn’t sure about.  I thought there were a number of aspects that would have been better if they’d been portrayed with a bit more subtlety, especially Madison. Madison is like the characters of Maria Bertram and Mrs Norris rolled into one so as you can imagine she is really horrible. However, Maria Bertram kept her horribleness under a veneer of propriety, so it was only because her parents didn’t know her well enough that meant she could get away from it. Here Madison is not just spoiled, childish, manipulative and conniving, but she throws tantrums, and the whole family is aware of her behaviour. It was so extreme it was almost bordering on mental illness. There were a few scenes featuring Madison which I found pretty unrealistic because I felt they were over the top.

I was a little disappointed with the Henry Crawford character too because he was such a nonentity, he is barely in the story. However, the flipside of this is that Tom Bertram was made a much bigger role. Tom was probably my favourite character in this story. He began the story as a party boy with a ‘cologne of beer’, but he was so funny and showed genuine fondness and empathy for Favor so I couldn’t help but soften towards him. Tom gets the best of the funny lines. For example, when Favor asks him if it's now 'you and me against the world' he wryly replies:

"Let's start locally, and go globally if needed."

However, Tom’s care for Favor only makes Ethan appear worse. The event mirroring the part in Mansfield Park when Edmund overlooks Fanny’s need to use her horse is far less forgivable in this book. I didn’t feel that Ethan had many redeeming features, he drops Favor like a hot cake when Mary Crawford arrives on the scene and he is generally selfish all the way through the book. I thought this was a shame, because although some people don’t have time for Edmund in Mansfield Park, I personally think that he was a responsible and thoughtful man, who genuinely cared for Fanny, and the fact that he cared for Mary Crawford before realising how he felt for Fanny Price is no more reprehensible than Elizabeth Bennet initially being attracted by Wickham in Pride & Prejudice.

Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park is a character that leaves me torn, because secretly I really like her, despite her faults. Mary is a very interesting character, but here she was more two-dimensional – this Mary is shallow, uncaring and a bragger. And that is really all there is to her.

I didn’t really understand Favor’s sudden determination to stake her place in the Brown household. If she’d been content to live for so many years on the periphery and taking a ‘you and me against the world’ attitude with Ethan you think that aside from him Favor would be keen to leave the rest of them behind. It didn’t feel likely that she would be so fiercely attached to them.

On the whole I enjoyed this author’s style. There was a lot of humour, which I enjoy. The book is written in the first person, from Favor’s point of view, but sometimes it didn’t seem to quite work – some of the descriptors used seemed awkward outside the third person, such as Favor describing her own eyes as liquid, etc.  I liked that the author had taken the time to work out how the upbringing had affected each child, as it was different in each case. I thought it was an ambitious attempt at a young adult version of a complex book and it wasn’t bad at all. I’ve read a few YA versions of Mansfield Park now, and my favourite is still the first one I read, Rosie Rushton’s ‘Whatever Love Is’, but this one is enjoyable too, and I'd give it 3½ stars.

Mansfield Ranch by Jenni James

As you might remember I am celebrating the bicentenary of Mansfield Park by trying to work in some Mansfield Park themed reads. This isn’t the first young adult version I’ve read; a while ago I read Rosie Rushton’s Whatever Love Is, which I thought was wonderful read and tied back really nicely to Mansfield Park. I would say Mansfield Ranch by Jenni James is aimed at a slightly younger audience. The heroine is only 16 years old, and it's a very 'clean' read.

Lilly Price (Fanny Price) has been fostered by the Benally family for the past 8 years, since she was 8 years old. Previously to that she lived in a children’s home. Lilly doesn’t fit in with her snobby foster sisters, Lauren and Alexis, and she’s always in trouble with Mr Benally. Mrs Benally doesn’t pay her much attention because she’s always too busy watching TV. Lilly isn’t especially popular at school, but she has one big high point in her life; her foster brother Sean Benally. Sean is a very sweet guy who has always been there for Lilly. She is much closer to him than to her foster sisters.

Sean does have his bad points though; he doesn’t always keep his mouth shut when he should. He thinks that Lilly is unappreciated at Mansfield Ranch and she deserves a nice boyfriend. He thinks that the new neighbours’ son, Harrison Crawford, would make a good match for her. Unfortunately he tells his sisters this and they spread the untrue news that Lilly is pursuing Harrison. This sets their relationship off on a bad footing, and Lilly soon decides that she doesn’t like him. Once Harrison realises that Lilly is serious in her dislike he decides to make her fall in love with him because nobody turns down Harrison Crawford.

This type of book must be hard to write, I think, because it needs to work as a modern book in its own right while still staying true to the original. For me, this one didn’t quite push all the right buttons. Firstly, the family situation was odd. Lilly was ignored by Mrs Benally, blamed for everything by Mr Benally, and ignored by the girls. Lilly seemed to be the only one who did chores and her car was much cheaper than her foster sisters and was actually sold as a punishment to her. It reminded me a bit of Cinderella. I wouldn’t have thought there would be this level of division in a foster family when the point of a foster family is to give a child a normal family life.

In Mansfield Park there is difference in the treatment, but Fanny wasn’t supposed to be treated like the Bertrams’ daughters, and in fact it would have been wrong for them to give her the expectation that her life could be the same as theirs, as she was poorer and lower socially and likely to remain so. These days, that is just not the case, girls are so much freer to make their own way in life. Also, a scenario where a foster brother and sister are romantically involved when they have been living together as siblings since the younger child was 8 is a bit of a grey area, especially when she's only 16 and not an adult at the time of the romance. For me, it has more of an incestuous ‘ick’ factor than first cousins in Regency times with a larger age gap who were brought up as cousins, particularly given the likelihood that Edmund would have gone to boarding school and so been absent for long periods whereas Sean actually lived with Lilly and saw her every day.

Lilly’s personality was very different from Fanny Price – she was feisty, but it went over the line into rude on quite a few occasions and she led on Harrison quite badly, something that Fanny would never have done. Aside from the challenge of a girl who doesn’t like him I am not sure what Harrison saw in her. He gave a list of her good qualities but for me they didn’t come across very strongly, and he only ever sees her at her worst, so how Harrison picked up on this stuff I don’t know.

Lilly doesn’t seem bothered about kissing her step-sister’s boyfriend, which is very different from Fanny’s sense of honour. The whole Lilly/Sean-Fanny/Edmund dynamic and storyline was very different here too – instead of settling for Fanny, which many people complain about in MP, instead here both Sean and Lilly used the Crawford siblings to an extent and I felt greater pity for both of them than I did reading Mansfield Park.

One thing I thought was reflected very well from the original was Lilly’s reason for not wanting to pursue a relationship with Harrison. She doesn’t feel she can trust him:

“I’m sure there are lots of girls willing to get burned by you, but frankly, I don’t have the time or the inclination to deal with a guy who’s just playing games. I want a real guy. A guy who thinks of me first. A guy who’s dependable and nice and caring and well, all the things you’re not.”

There was a point where I thought that the Crawfords would come out blameless victims, but things weren't changed that much!

There are other books in the series which have already been released – Pride and Popularity, Northanger Alibi, Persuaded and Emmalee. From the notes at the back of Mansfield Ranch I noticed that another four books are planned. These are Sensible and Sensational (Sense & Sensibility) and also Sand & Sun, The Wilsons and Queen Sidney (I am presuming these are Austen's Sanditon, The Watsons and Lady Susan respectively, none of which I’ve read yet).

Whatever Love is by Rosie Rushton

As part of my celebration of all things Mansfield, here are my thoughts on a book a read last year. Whatever Love is? is part of a series updating Jane Austen's classic stories for a younger audience, and is an updated version of Mansfield Park. I've always thought that this can't be an easy title to update when you consider she is very passive by modern standards but I felt that Rosie Rushton did an excellent job.

18 year old Frankie Price has been living with her adoptive aunt's family for the past few years since her mother has mental health issues. She's very much the poor relation as her Aunt has married a rich man who has a successful clothing business. Frankie doesn't really fit in with her privileged, pretty spoiled, rich cousins. The one she feels closest to is Ned, who is a couple of years her senior. Frankie has romantic feelings towards Ned (this is not as weird as it sounds, as they are not related and the Aunts for years have stressed that they're not related to Mrs Price and her children).

A problem with foreign suppliers sends Frankie's adoptive uncle abroad and while he's gone his children end up preparing to perform at a music festival, in the company of the Crawfords, a brother and sister who are step-siblings of one of Frankie's friends.

One thing I really liked about this book were the quotes from Mansfield Park at the beginning of each chapter. These were relevant to the chapter at hand and highlighted which aspects were tying back to Mansfield Park. Many of the events from MP are represented; Fanny's horse riding exercise becomes Frankie's driving practice, the play becomes the music festival etc.

There are some differences too - the characters of Mrs Norris and Maria Bertram (Nerys and Mia) were massively more likeable than in Mansfield Park, and something that was largely glossed over in the original, the fact that Sir Thomas had slaves contributing to his fortune, is explored here a bit more, with Mr Bertram discovering that his clothing is being stitched by child labour and other unfair working practices in Mexico. Also, in Mansfield Park I felt there was a very strong nature/nurture debate which isn't present in this book.

There were other aspects that were different, but I felt kept Austen's themes intact; characters such as Henry and Mary Crawford are probably much more appealing to a modern audience than they would have been at the time and Fanny can be hard to identify with because she's so low-key. However, here Henry is a charming slime bag, his sister Alice is amusing but shallow and although Frankie is not accustomed to putting her needs first she's not a complete doormat and we see a lot of her thoughts, which helps the reader identify with her. The end of the book is wrapped up quite abruptly, which is a nod back to MP I could have done without to be honest, I'd have liked a bit more detail!

To get the full experience of reading Mansfield Park you are obviously better off reading the book itself rather than an update, but to get the gist of it, particularly for a younger reader, this book is a really worthy update.

Epic Fail by Claire Lazebnik

This is a young adult story, based on Pride and Prejudice.  Elise (the Elizabeth character) and her family have relocated to California from Massachusetts.  Her mother has taken a job as a school principal at a school that Elise and her sisters will attend. Elise is the second of four sisters.  Her elder sister, Juliana, and she are very close.  Then there is a bit of an age gap to Layla (the Lydia character) and the youngest in the family is 10 year old Kaitlyn.

Juliana immediately catches the notice of Chase.  His sister Chelsea is a bit of a snob, she is desperately trying to catch the notice of Chase's friend, dishy Derek.  Derek's parents are Hollywood royalty and he is used to people noticing him, talking about him, and girls falling at his feet.  He is very standoffish because of the amount of people who are trying to become his friend purely because of his parents' fame. He's not especially welcoming to Elise or Juliana, and Elise makes a new friend, Webster Grant (the Wickham character) who reinforces Elise's prejudiced beliefs that Derek thinks he's better than everybody else. Derek knows that Webster isn't the nice guy he portrays himself to be, and does his best to ensure that Elise doesn't get taken in by Webster's charm.

Although this is set in the modern day, and the characters are teenagers, many of the main events from Pride and Prejudice were recognisable, and some I thought were particularly ingenious, such as how Layla is rescued from Webster, and how Chase and Juliana's relationship is temporarily split.  I thought that the Webster/Georgia (Derek's sister) back-story was particularly clever, because what he had done is plausible in a modern setting and just as despicable as Wickham's attempted behaviour in P&P. There were also some quotes which referred back to quotes in Pride and Prejudice, which I really liked.

There were some differences however. Firstly, Derek is less flawed than Darcy - not only is he far less proud but he is far less active in his friend's relationship.  Elise, although likeable, is less likeable than Lizzy. One of the things I always liked about Lizzy was the playful tone which deflects a lot of the hurt from her statements; Elise's sarcasm is much more blunt. I also wasn't sure what she saw in Webster. I know I was coming at it in the knowledge that he was the Wickham character and not to be trusted, but I thought he was a bit of an idiot.  I felt the character of Layla was so much more sympathetically portrayed than Lydia Bennet, rather than being brash and uncontrolled she is desperately trying to be grown up and part of the tight relationship between Elise and Juliana, and they aren't letting her in.

I also felt that the ending was a little bit sudden.  I would have liked to have had an idea of what was going to happen after the end of the story. Miss Austen didn't give us an epilogue but she did give us some snippets about Elizabeth and Darcy's future, and we were clear where the relationship was going, but in this, since they are in different years in school and Derek is talking about moving away, it's not clear at all.

I thought this was a really good modern update of Pride and Prejudice, and I'd certainly recommend it. I think it's aimed at a teen audience and I would be happy to give it to a younger person to read.  There are some vague references to taking things further than kissing, but nothing explicit, and there are only a few instances of swearing.  This author has updated some other Austen books; there is a Mansfield Park update (The Trouble with Flirting) and a Persuasion update (The Last Best Kiss) is due for release in April 2014, and I plan to read them both.