Character Development: ☆
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that every bookworm secretly wishes to be Lizzie Bennet.A less acknowledged truth is that Mary Bennet might be a better fit.For seventeen-year-old Marnie Barnes, who's convinced she is the long-suffering protagonist of her life, this revelation comes at the end of a series of self-induced disasters that force her to confront a devastating truth: Marnie has more in common with Mary Bennet - the utterly forgettable middle sister - than the effervescent Lizzie.Determined to reinvent herself, she enlists the help of her bubbly roommate and opens herself up to the world - leading lady style. And between new friends, a very cute boy, and a rescue pup named Sir Pat, Marnie realizes that being the main character doesn't mean rewriting your life entirely. It's about finding the right cast of characters, the love interest of your dreams, and, most important, embracing your story, flaws and all."
God, this book sucked.
Sorry, normally I try to write my reviews with a little more tact, barring like a Kissing Booth situation, but I went into this one with such high hopes and was SO immediately disappointed, and then it only got worse from there. For starters, I really didn't love that the names of all the characters mirrored the names of the characters in Pride & Prejudice, but it WASN'T a retelling. It's too cutesy, man. Do you want to write a retelling? Cool, use the same or similar names. Are you writing what is supposed to be an entirely separate thing where the main character identifies with a character in a book they like? Then it's weird. Had this been my only issue, forgivable. But it was a drop in the bucket.
My biggest issue? Marnie is supremely unlikeable and DOES NOT GET BETTER. We start off the book with her being a complete asshole to her seemingly very kind roommate over said roommate wanting to take her out for her eighteenth birthday. Truly, Adhira might be the sweetest, most patient character I've ever encountered in a book. She takes Marnie out to celebrate, is incredibly supportive of her idea for the Hunt Prize (more on that later), AND helps connect her with an organization she could partner with, and in return Marnie is a condescending asshole about Adhira's Hunt Prize project, doubles down when Adhira confronts her about it, and then straight up refuses to apologize and just hides out until finally ADHIRA surprises her with her favorite dessert as a peace offering.
Unforgivably shitty behavior. And what's worse, this is behavior she repeats at the end of the book, again after Adhira has done something unbelievably kind and thoughtful for her, and even then her response is "well what am I supposed to do, I guess this is just who I am, it's not like I could apologize or something so I'll just throw myself a pity party because no one likes me because I'm the worst!" And ONCE AGAIN, Adhira is the one who initiates the making up! Zero growth for Marnie throughout the entire book. She. Is. Awful.
Next up, her obsession with Hayes. Not only is it weird, and not only does it haunt the pages of this book for far longer than it should have, but the whole thing reads like Hayes is an older sibling's friend humoring the younger sibling he knows has a crush on him. Is Hayes sleazy and shitty? Absolutely. But in much more of an "I'm an insincere rich guy schmoozing" than in an "I'm a predator grooming young teens" way. It's like Peterson wanted there to be some salacious conflict but wasn't actually comfortable taking it there, so instead the ultimate conflict is a complete nothingburger until immediately before his wedding, when it was like look, we can't have Marnie, precious heroine of the book, involved in something like this, so we'll just have her shitty antagonist classmate be the one who got taken advantage of, because she doesn't ultimately matter to the story. Ew.
Speaking of her shitty antagonist classmate...let's talk about another example of salacious conflict that turned out to be nothing. So Lia, her classmate of many years, has been terrible to her since the moment they met, right? Her dad, Casper, is similarly terrible to her, and she can't understand why, until whispered rumors of some kind of drama between Casper and her dad start reaching her, and she's like wait, what? Tries to ask her dad, he won't say. Tries to look online, there's NOTHING there...because, of course, it is famously easy to scrub things from the internet that you don't want on there. "The internet is forever"? Not a thing. Anyway, at some point, Lia and Marnie get into a screaming match and after Lia tells her that Marnie's family ruined her life and Marnie retorts that she hardly thinks SHE ruined her life, Lia says, "You ruined everything," followed closely by, "you're the reason my mom left."
Now, what could all this be about? (I thought Lia's dad cheated with Marnie's mom or something and Marnie was the result. Nope.) Marnie has a lightbulb moment and goes to the librarian for help researching what happens, and of course the librarian has a little hidden stash with the information because she refused to allow the headmaster to purge everything about it, and she reveals.......drumroll, please.........that Casper Lawson used Marnie's dad's name to basically swindle a bunch of Mr. Barnes' friends out of investment money, and in response, Mr. Barnes took out three full-page ads warning people away from Casper. Which, when confronted about, he describes as an out-sized reaction to what Casper did. (Is it? I would argue it is not.) Anyway, after this confrontation with Lia, she chills out toward Marnie and things become neutral, almost good, between them. Because, of course. The whole thing...was nothing.
While we're on the topic of nothing, let's talk about all of Marnie's conflict with her family and with Whit, the darling love interest introduced early in the book and then strung along like a fourth-rate character when he deserved main character treatment. Truly, he and Adhira are two of the only well-developed characters in this book. But I digress.
Re: her relationship with her family, we kick off the book with Marnie bemoaning how everyone in the family likes everyone but her and they all leave her out because they're all so great and they think she sucks. She's jealous of her older sister, Lindy, she resents her younger sisters because they're close to each other and not to her, but she absolutely shit talks every. single. one of them. Additionally one of the first examples we see of her family "excluding" her or her parents caring more about her older sisters than her is when there's a small family get-together planned that she is like yeah, I'm not going to that, but then ultimately decides at the last minute to attend.
So, she crashes this party, and then she's highly offended that they didn't expect her to come. (Even though, please note, her older sister Joss's wife baked her her favorite cupcake as a birthday present. So...someone expected her to come AND made her something she loves as a gift. But no one likes her.) Anyway, at the party, Lindy starts to announce her first pregnancy and Marnie tries to interrupt to pull her dad away to talk about the Hunt Prize and then gets butthurt because her dad asks her to wait...you know, because his other daughter is announcing that she's going to have a baby? Kind of a big deal. Marnie gets so upset that she ruins the announcement, storms out, and then dodges everyone's calls and texts. Sorry, Marnie, but I think the problem here is you.
Later, Lindy takes huge interest in Marnie's Hunt Prize project and thinks it's great, and the entire time Marnie is like wow, butting in much? Ugh, how dare you be interested in something about me? But also, why doesn't my family pay attention to meeeee? They only start getting along when Lizzy - sorry, Lindy - gets into a horrible car accident, almost dies, and loses the baby, which...don't even get me started on how unnecessary that was. And even this only seemed to be included to advance Marnie's manufactured drama, because while she was staying at the hospital to bond with Lindy over the death of her baby and the destruction of her body, she forgot that she was supposed to hang out with Whit, and when she replied to his texts later, instead of telling him what happened she decided to go with "sorry, family stuff." And then proceeded to be surprised when he took that as her blowing him off. Because...that's what it was.
Oh, and does she apologize to Whit after all that? Not really, although she DOES get upset with him for being late to the Hunt Prize fair, because that's the only thing that matters. And at last, we reach the promised "more on that" about...the Hunt Prize. It's introduced at the start of the book, this huge honor that Marnie MUST win, because LINDY won it, so it's obviously the only way for her to prove to her family that she's just as good as her older sister. What is the Hunt Prize? Couldn't tell you. The whole premise of the prize feels hazy to me, I don't totally understand the purpose or the importance, and truly I don't think the author did either. It read like "I want something prestigious for everyone to be competing for, but I don't want to have to actually flesh it out so it makes sense."
The competition seemed like it was supposed to be the centerpiece of the plot, but it dips in and out of the story, popping back up whenever it's convenient for the drama and disappearing in between. The timeline of the book follows the timeline of the competition, but we see Marnie doing very little actual work on it (at the aforementioned fair, Adhira is the one who made the signage she used for her booth, and Marnie literally says that the only thing her booth has going for it are the adoptable dogs that Whit brings, so...what did SHE do for it?), and everything about her project and how successful it is is told to the reader, not showed to them.
Maybe if the book had centered more fully on the Hunt Prize and shown more of it instead of bouncing back and forth between other, disconnected things, the storytelling would have been more successful, but as it stands the whole thing felt like a muddy, confused mess and read more like an early draft than a finished story. The majority of the characters are one-dimensional, including and especially Marnie, the majority of the conflict is manufactured, and the whole premise of "main character who wants to be an Elizabeth is actually a Mary" is flimsy and poorly executed. I am a huge Pride & Prejudice fan and I look forward to anything P&P related, so I was really looking forward to reading this and even specifically SAVED it to read together with my husband, but we both hated every second of it. It truly should have been a DNF, but we stuck with it to see if at any point it redeemed itself. Spoiler: It did not.
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