I loved this. I think I've pooped out on writing good book reviews and this one deserves better than I'm up to writing, but this is super fun, super fun tone, and the author makes the premise work in between and after the plot of Pride and Prejudice. The concept is that Lydia is a witch, really technically the seventh child, and Kitty is her cat familiar that she's made people think is a girl. She gets trained in witchcraft by her aunt, runs into a demon and makes a bad promise at an early age, and then later gets involved with Wickham, who's now possessed by the demon's son. It should probably be telling that the demon's actually slightly a better dude than Wickham?
The book slips back and forth (a bit confusingly) between Lydia's current life as a poor wife (or "wife" because I guess it's not legal, or they haven't had marital sex, or something...it's a bit confusing to me on this) who's isolated from her past life, and how she runs into Georgina Darcy, who's been bespelled for her own protection. Lydia helpfully takes the spell off--Georgina's not loving how it makes her feel dumb--and is recruited to help Georgina, whose issues get weirder as time goes on. The other plottline we skip back and forth between is how Lydia got into this situation--she went off to Brighton with her bestie Harriet Forster, who's distinctly resentful at being married off to an old guy. Brighton's got a thriving witch community and Lydia is forced by that demon to go look for a jewel. This forces Lydia to befriend Mary King, an islander heiress of color who comes off as unpleasant and priggish at first, and then ends up having hidden depths.
I enjoyed this whole plot a lot, as the author really makes it all work. Lydia is kind of shallow and a bit cruel but improves and isn't as much of a jerk as she comes off in the books, and the personality development of her and Mary is great. Even Wickham has his moments. About the only critique I have is that keeping track of the timelines is a bit confusing and I'd rather that have been spelled out better.
Four and a half stars.
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