Review: A nice young adult romance circa Pride and Prejudice!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 27, 2012
(I received a digital copy of this book for free on a read-to-review basis. Thanks to Cecilia Gray.)16-year-old Lizzie is a student at the prestigious Jane Austen Academy (Jasta), a school which has been her home for several years. Things are changing this year though as the school has been sold, and it's new owners want to make changes.The first thing to change is the student number - with double the usual number of students attending, the second change is that the new students will be male, drastically changing the atmosphere at the previously all-girl school.Lizzie however is determined to set things right, a goal that she started working on before term even started by writing an inflammatory piece for the student newspaper, basically dissing the new owners and new developments at the school.When Lizzie does arrive to start the new school year, she finds that her room sharing request has not been honoured, and instead of sharing a room with her best friend Ellie, she is sharing a room with Anne, the former school owner's daughter. Complaining to the headmistress about this problem, Lizzie relents and accepts the new living arrangements when the headmistress offers her the opportunity to be the managing editor of the student newspaper, a job that Lizzie has been lusting after.Still more changes are happening at Jasta though, and now Lizzie is on a quest to find out who the new owners are and to talk to them, and to stop the proposed name change of the school. What she doesn't realise is how this crusade of hers will affect her relationship with her best friend Ellie, and her feelings towards the gorgeous Dante, one of the new students at the school who seems to be hiding some secrets of his own.This book is a modern retelling of `Pride and prejudice `. Unfortunately though I haven't read pride and prejudice yet so I'm not sure how alike the two books are! Irregardless of this I enjoyed this book. The main character Lizzie was ridiculously headstrong at times, and made some poor decisions too, but a lot of this was in her quest to become a journalist, so I have to let her off on that one. If she hadn't of made the decisions she did she probably wouldn't have been much of a journalist.The story was paced nicely and well written, and held my attention all the way through. The characters were genuine, and although the storyline did seem to be a bit predictable in places it didn't spoil it for me. Both fortunately and unfortunately, although we got some answers at the end of this book, the story wasn't really finished. Fortunately this means that there must be another book to come, but unfortunately it means that we have to wait to find out the rest of Lizzie's story!Overall - an enjoyable read and I'm looking forward to the next one!7.5 out of 10.(Book length: 2156 Kindle Locations)