I got exactly what I wanted out of this book, something I haven’t had much of lately. And even if I did have some recent satisfying reads, which, again, I haven’t, I’m sure Pride & Prejudice & Pittsburgh would’ve still stood out.
Audrey Cameron is a teen from Pittsburgh who has dreams of going to art school. But after her boyfriend dumped her months ago, she just fell into a what’s-the-point phase she hasn’t been able to get out of. She has two weeks to resubmit after the school found she had potential but not quite the soul they were looking for. But maybe it’s time to park herself behind her dad’s convenience store, which he built from the ground up and she and her parents live overtop of. But she gets a special guest one day, a wise old man and recurring shopper named Mr. Montgomery. He gives her some kind of special good-luck quarter. The next thing Audrey knows, she is whisked away 200 years into the past. To 1812.
There, or then, she meets Lucy Sinclair, a betrothed teenage girl set to be married to a snobby fortune heiress. Lucy finds her out in the field unconscious and brings her in, even though for some reason she is wearing men’s trousers. Lucy decides by the goodness of her heart to take her in, and the two of them end up teaming up to theorize how to get Audrey back to the timeline. A hint is that she still has that quarter, and there’s a number on it…that decreases, by one, after every day.
So, the actual Pride & Prejudice story from Jane Austen is an interesting bag for me. I’ve never read it, but thanks to watching the 2005 movie and starring as Colonel Fitzwilliam in a play of the book two years ago, I’m familiar with it. And in my opinion, as cool as it was to star in an adaptation of it, it has severely outdated dynamics of almost all the female characters, who are excited for a quick marriage to swanky men with big inheritance money, and I’m not a fan of stories like that. But on the other hand, it was normal for women at that time to not have the rights to pursue independence, so the men of the world were all some dreamt they could have. Plus, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy are admittedly really good characters, and at the same time, they were the only interesting characters out of the whole cast. Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy were revolutionary characters at the time, and I applaud Jane Austen for what she was able to do when she wrote this, but in the end, Pride & Prejudice is just not my type of story.
Rachael Lippincott’s fantasy tale has spiked the concept of Austen’s classic up, getting a girl with the same opinions as me on the outdatedness of the themes, and bringing her to this time to open a young girl’s eyes up to new possibilities, and the result is a heartwarming, hilarious and gush-worthy little adventure.
We’ve seen the story before of people from different cultures, different backgrounds, different timelines, reveal all that is there where or when they’re from. I expected some of this going in. The concept screams culture shock, and what I love about it here is that the both of them find hope in their lives in experiencing a different kind of life. Lucy gets hope of actual romance and independence and Audrey gets hope of finding her passion again. Audrey and Lucy’s stories are both captivating, and both points of view brought a chuckle whenever they experienced all the differences in their lives, plus the small similarities. Sometimes the book slows down a little when it’s introducing all these minor characters from Lucy’s world and their relations, but there’s fortunately not so many that the book gets too cluttered. If that’s the only thing in this book I can find fault with, I can totally live with it.
If you enjoy romances; fairy tales, forbidden, LGBTQ, or all of the above, and you enjoy follow-your-dreams stories, and I’d say you’d have to be an old grump to say you’re not, this is definitely the book for you. I devoured it and might read it all again.
My grade: 5 stars out of 5
William J. McGinn 
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