Georgiana Darcy’s Diary by Anna Elliott (Review)

If you are looking for the A to Z post (H), click on the button to the left or scroll down.

This book is a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, and one in which the characters and events of that book are followed faithfully. The only point at which I found my eyebrows rising was Wickham’s return. In general I enjoyed the depiction of Georgiana, and the sketches (allegedly hers) with which the book is adorned. She is a character whom we are shown just enough of in Pride and Prejudice that we want to know how life turned out for her, and this book gives her quite a logical partner.

The diary format works much better in this book than in Mr. Darcy’s Diary by Amanda Grange, which I read earlier but did not review. Here we get the feeling we are really reading the writing of a young woman, one who sketches some of the incidents she describes in the pages of her diary. Lady Catherine de Burgh is as determined to marry Georgiana to a husband of her choosing as she was earlier to see her brother married to her own daughter, Anne.

Anne herself reappears, as does Bingley’s sister Caroline and Darcy’s  cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam.  In addition there are new characters, which I will leave to the reader to discover.

I haven’t read a lot of sequels to Pride and Prejudice, but I liked this one.

Humans (A to Z Challenge)

This is a place where my science fiction departs from general scientific agreement. I have assumed that the modern human species – almost – evolved in Africa. But I have also assumed a R’il’nian, Jarn (who will be my “J”) was stranded in Africa some 125,000 years ago, and that for some reason which is still not well understood, he turned out to be slightly fertile with these primitive humans. They were already more artistic than the R’il’nai (mostly expressed in adorning themselves) and using language, but his genetic addition, slight though it was, kindled something additional within them. In my universe we are all remote descendants of Jarn.

Jarn was a starship designer, and with the aid of the information on the computer from the escape module, he was able, over several millennia, to get his descendants to develop a starship to carry him home. But they didn’t stop there. The global population was not large, and they split between those, mostly more technically oriented, who followed Jarn back to the stars and eventually became the ancestors of the Humans in my science fiction, and those who stayed on Earth, rapidly lost their force-grown technical civilization (they were mostly the ones who disliked technology anyway) and became our ancestors.

The early crossbreds and others who showed a high percentage of R’il’nian genes were wiped out in an epidemic lethal to them but not to Humans roughly ten thousand years ago, as were many of the R’il’nai. The Jarnian Confederation in its present state developed in the period following the epidemic.

I’m doing my A to Z blogs from my books, both characters and background information. For characters I’ll introduce them quickly, say what point of time they’re talking from since their situations change drastically through the books, and let them talk. Background information will vary according to what I’m talking about. All of these blogs will be scheduled to go live just after midnight Alaska time.