THE BENNET WOMEN
Appiah-Kubi, Eden Montlake Romance (366 pp.) $9.99 paper | Jul. 20, 2021 978-1-5420-2917-9
y o u n g a d u lt
Pride & Prejudice goes to college. At the prestigious Longbourn College in Massachusetts, best friends EJ, Jamie, and Tessa are members of Bennet House, the first female residence on campus. For them, being Bennet Women isn’t just about where they live, it’s an ethos adapted from the Bennet House Rules—act with maturity, support your sisters, embrace the adventure of Longbourn. And this year is shaping up to be more adventure-filled than most thanks to fellow student Lee Gregory, son of Hollywood royalty, and the arrival of his arrogant friend Will Pak, a recently disgraced actor. When Jamie finds her match in Lee, EJ agrees to put up with Will’s rudeness and insulting behavior for her sake. As they spend more time together, a tentative friendship begins to grow—along with Will’s attraction to EJ. That is, until Jordan Walker, an old enemy of Will’s, makes EJ’s acquaintance and begins wreaking havoc at Longbourn. Now Will and EJ will both have to put their pride aside to prevent the past from repeating itself. The cast of characters is diverse—EJ is Black, Jamie is a recently out trans woman, Tessa is Filipina, and Will has both Chinese and Korean heritage—and hearing EJ, Jamie, Tessa, and the other women who populate Longbourn discuss ambitious career goals, healthy sex lives, and more with unabashed frankness is refreshing. But this tale has been told (and retold) many times, and the plot doesn’t offer enough in the way of innovation or excitement to feel wholly necessary. The relationship between EJ and Will, this novel’s Elizabeth and Darcy, also lacks the same intense slow-burn spark that has made the original couple a pop-culture mainstay for centuries. A fine but mostly forgettable addition to the large library of Austen-inspired novels.
few cigarettes; makes the titular train journey into the recently war-ravaged north, during which he recalls a love affair now over; attends a village funeral. That’s it. And yet the novel is charged throughout with tension and excitement. Part of that derives from Arudpragasam’s fierce intelligence and his total commitment to plumbing Krishan’s psyche, to following his thoughts patiently, relentlessly, with exquisite subtlety. Not many writers can successfully invite comparison to W.G. Sebald’s slow, inward, thoughtful—yet somehow pulse-pounding—novels, but Arudpragasam can and does. The rest of the novel’s tension comes from the powerfully evoked historical context. This isn’t just the aftermath of a love now over, or of a young man’s idealistic early 20s, or even of the life of a grandmother’s caretaker now dead in what appears to be an accidental fall down a well (the funeral to which Krishan is headed); beneath them all, agitating the water to which the book returns again and again, is the long, still-rippling wake of Sri Lanka’s bloody three-decade civil war, in which the grandmother’s caretaker, Rani, lost both her sons (and in which Krishan’s father was killed). The result, if such a thing be possible,
A PASSAGE NORTH
Arudpragasam, Anuk Hogarth/Crown (304 pp.) $27.00 | Jul. 13, 2021 978-0-593-23070-1
Arudpragasam, whose first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, made a critical splash in 2016, is back with an intelligent, quite often moving novel of meditation and aftermath. The plot of this book, conventionally speaking, would fit on a cocktail napkin: Krishan, a young Sri Lankan man who lives in the southern city of Colombo and works for a nongovernmental organization there, receives a phone call; takes a long walk, during which he stops to smoke a |
kirkus.com
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fiction
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15 may 2021
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