Review: Mary Bennet and the Beast of Rosings Park

Mary Bennet and the Beast of Rosings Park by Joyce Harmon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this one out of series order, having picked it up on a BookBub sale after reading the first. I've been waiting to get the second book on sale, but, in the middle of a book drought, finally decided to just go ahead and read it. It sounds like the second book is quite an adventure, and I still do plan to get it at some point.

Here we see Mary Bennet (the middle sister from Pride and Prejudice) staying with her cousin Mr. Collins at his vicarage beside the great estate of Rosings, as she recuperates from magical exhaustion occasioned by the plot of the second book. This third one is a mystery, with sheep (and eventually a person) being killed and mutilated in the area, seemingly by something that may or may not be the legendary beast that inhabits the woods of Rosings Park. Mary uses her magical skills and, even more so, her intelligence and courage to eventually solve the mystery, and along the way we get quite a different perspective on young Anne de Bourgh, and even on prosy Mr Collins and his patroness, Anne's mother Lady Catherine. It's not a wild thrill ride of a plot; there's still a lot of Regency visiting and conversation and marital maneuvering, aimed presumably at the fans of the source material, and there's seldom any sense of urgency, but there are a couple of relatively tense scenes, especially the climax.

The copy editing issues are individually minor, but there are a lot of them (more than 50): mispunctuated dialog, missing quotation marks or (occasionally) periods, missing commas, misplaced apostrophes, small words accidentally substituted for other similar words, errors of tense and number, and a couple of homonyms. This is one reason I'm not prepared to pay $5.99 USD for these, the other reason being that, while they're enjoyable, they're not anything like twice as good as plenty of other books that cost half that much.

Overall, it earns four stars as a pleasant read, but doesn't make it onto my Best of the Year.

View all my reviews