Book Chat this week

This week I'll be having a noontime book chat about Marsha Altman's The Darcys and the Bingleys: Pride and Prejudice Continues
with J. Kaye at her book blog. Here's the schedule:

Monday: J. Kaye's Book Blog
Tuesday: Necromancy Never Pays
Wednesday: J. Kaye's Book Blog
Thursday: Necromancy Never Pays
Friday: Necromancy Never Pays and J. Kaye's Book Blog

As many Jane Austen fans have noted since it came out in September, 2008, Altman’s The Darcys and the Bingleys is not for Austen purists, but I found it more fun to read than many of the other Austen “sequels” I've sampled. As Altman notes (here), the number of these "sequels" have exploded in recent years. There’s an Austen fan fiction website (www.austen.com) and even an entertaining novel about a vacation spot where Austen lovers can pretend to be in her books (Austenland by Shannon Hale). (See my earlier post about "sequels" here.)

Lev Grossman (in his Nov. 19, 2007 Time magazine review of Donald McCaig’s Rhett Butler’s People) says that “sequels” are “one of the oddities of the current literary moment….Where once they were inviolable, the margins of books have become porous, with characters slipping in and out like naughty teenagers to lead their own lives when it suits them. It’s almost as if we’ve come to distrust the brief, biased glimpses their creators gave us. Like investigative bloggers, we’re determined to get the whole story, from all points of view, complete with outtakes and DVD extras.”

Well, J. Kaye and I are bloggers, and we're going to discuss this book's particular point of view on how the characters from Pride and Prejudice could have continued.