Mary B promises to be Pride and Prejudice from Mary Bennet’s perspective. Mary is everyone’s least-favorite Bennet sister, and her spin-offs range from hilariously awful to just another chance for poor Mary to be overlooked.

The beginning of this story focuses on two questions that everyone who’s read Pride and Prejudice has asked: Why doesn’t Mr Bennet have more time for the daughter who tries so hard to be sensible? Why didn’t Mr. Collins and Mary fall in love, when they would so clearly live happily ever after?  Sure, social-climber Collins might be too self-absorbed to notice the Bennet sister who would clearly make him happiest, but why doesn’t Mrs. Bennet shove Mary under his nose? I was happy to see the author of Mary B wondering the same things.

After a promising beginning, this novel then pairs Mary with whoever is nearest. Mary and Mr. Collins makes perfect sense, but her next romance, with Col. Fitzwilliam, seemed born from a desire not to add any new characters to the cast, rather than any spark that could be fanned into a flame. There’s a strange part where Mary and Col. Fitzwilliam run around Pemberley, boinking each other and encouraging the servants’ rumor that the spare rooms are haunted. I guess Mary might be attention-starved enough to take that risk, but wouldn’t the example of Lydia’s shameful and disastrous marriage be a deterrent? (Especially since in this novel, Lydia dies in poverty, abandoned by Wickham. Which, I mean, Wickham would absolutely do.)

The next part of the book is some super weird Mary Bennett/Mr. Darcy fanfic, and even without the weird machinations to get Lizzie out of the picture, that is just not a pairing that makes any sense. Like, even if one day Lizzie Bennet woke up and decided that actually, she had married Darcy for his money and social connections, and actually they don’t have anything in common, there isn’t enough between Mary and Darcy to sustain a conversation, let alone a secret romance.

Oh, well, at least it was nice to know that other P&P readers had the same questions about poor Mary in the original.