Liberty Reads

Places to find me--

StoryGraph

GoodReads

Instagram

Pucks & Pages Stuff

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. Rating: 3.25 stars.

Read from July 11th to 16th.

I feel like I need to start off this review by explaining who I am as a reader. I feel like I tend to read pretty widely as far as genres go. I'll read a Christmas Romance one week and a SciFi Horror the next. But one of the few genres I intentionally ignore most of the time is Classics. I also don't like Historical Fiction which feels pretty similar to Classics. Something about them just drives me up the wall. They feel hard to get into and, especially Classics, hard to understand all of the context for when the book would have come out and what was going on in the world at that time. The only Classics I've ever read were ones I was forced to read or ones I did for reading challenges. This one is technically also from a reading challenge. But I decided to give it a shot when I saw a Tumblr post saying that Henry Tilney never did anything wrong. (Which...yes.) After that, I knew I had to give this a chance.

I feel like this story could be a lot of different stories. Because we see the heroine going to Bath to experience the season for balls. In this we get the John Thorpe of it all and different relationships. But we also see Catherine go to Northanger Abbey and let her mind get away from her about all the different Gothic horrors she may experience (she doesn't realize she's basically in a turn of the century RomCom). But then we get more relationships and drama at the end. It does all fit together but as I was reading it, it felt very disjointed. Catherine as a character was hard for me to categorize. She felt young (because in the book she's 17, so she is) and kept doing or saying things that really made me cringe. It feels like that was sort of the point but, as the person doing the cringing, it wasn't the best time. I agree with others that the book was pretty boring at times. I wanted more satire on the Gothic genre than we got.