Review: "Being Mary Bennet" by J.C. Peterson

 

Being Mary Bennet by J.C. Peterson
Published March 2022 via HarperTeen
★★★★

A fun twist on an Austen retelling—this one from the perspective of the much-maligned Mary Bennet. Marnie is the middle daughter: never considered as witty or as smart or as pretty as her sisters, she's the one who tries so hard and can't necessarily see when her efforts fall flat.

But Marnie is out to change that.

I particularly appreciate that this is a reinterpretation of Pride and Prejudice rather than a straight-up retelling—many recognisable characters, certainly, but clearly no need felt to stick to the original plot at all costs. This makes sense, because Mary Bennet didn't have all that much of a story in the original, but it's also helpful in that it gives Peterson a lot more room to make the story make sense for a different time and place.

Two things to note: first, this is teeeeeechnically a boarding-school book, but it might as well not be—Marnie spends more time with her family than with her classmates, and I don't think we ever see her in class. And second, the more I think about Marnie as Mary, the more I wonder about other Bennet stories untold: think about Lydia, who does not come off well in the original and is probably destined for quite an unhappy marriage. Or think about Jane, who never really goes beyond 'good and beautiful'. Or Kitty, who is mostly just...there. What might their stories look like if they were the protagonists in their own stories?