Keeping the Castle

Keeping the Castle by Patrice Kindl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Think of this book as Jane Austen-training wheels. It's similar, both thematically and storywise, with slightly less demanding language than the classics.

I heard about this on NPR, and their review captures it better than I ever could:

"Patrice Kindl ... has made her name writing for teens," Pearl says, "but this is the kind of book that has great crossover appeal to adults — especially adults who love Jane Austen. This is a young woman who is ... holding her family together. She has two stepsisters who are kind of wicked, her mother is pretty ineffectual, and they live in a very crumbling castle. ... And the next castle over, a new family comes to live there, and they have two non-married young men of just the right age. And, of course, one is dashing and funny and handsome, and the other is a little bit snarky and not someone you would want to be interested in....

"[Jane Austen] made it look so easy, and it's very hard to get that exact wryness and humor and these little tart observations that she makes in Pride and Prejudice. ... It isn't Jane Austen, but it's one of the closest things to Jane Austen that I've read."

I really, really enjoyed it: by the last fifty pages, I was very reluctant to put it down. I'm wavering between an four and a five for this. It skillfully combines little homages to lots of different books (Austen, I Capture the Castle) into one sweet confection of a story.

ETA: A friend asked me if I really thought that Austen's language is demanding, and so I should clarify that I think Austen is pretty accessible, as classics go, but Keeping the Castle is written in a much more modern vernacular, comparatively.

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