The Bad Miss Bennett Abroad

I feel like I’d be remiss in my Austen-spinoff reading if I skip this one, but honestly, I wish I’d just skipped reading it.

The Bad Miss Bennet Abroad follows Lydia Bennet Wickham (who really should be The Bad Mrs Wickham, right?) as she tries to land herself a wealthy husband. She has the same complaining spirit and lack of scruples as the original Lydia Bennet, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Wickham disappeared and left his wife with debts and a bad reputation.

Bad girls abroad, especially a scandalous young widow traveling to exotic lands, sounds like a good premise, doesn’t it? And, I really enjoyed the new spin on an unfavorite character found in The Epic Adventures of Lydia Bennett. But, ugh, I actually disliked this so much that I skipped and skimmed, hoping it would get better. The descriptions were tedious, and I started to get annoyed at how many scheming misadventures were crammed in and how little character growth resulted. It was hard to care about yet another scheme.

I was also a bit annoyed by the changes to the Darcy’s characters. We’ve already seen Mr. Darcy pay a lot of money to pull Wickham, a man he hated, back from ruin, all in order to protect Lydia, and by extension, Elizabeth. The idea that manipulative Lydia couldn’t get any more money and help out her brother-in-law seems to go against everything we know about Darcy and Elizabeth.