Just So Stories

Harper Collins Australia

January 2025

• ISBN: 9780062889874
• ISBN 10: 0062889877
• Imprint: HarperCollins US
• List Price: 24.99 AUD

I very much enjoyed #2 in this series which I reviewed last year and did also like this one very much. Not quite as much, but that was merely a personal preference. It is just as well-written and engaging but I think tried a little too hard with the whole gender diversity and romantic entanglements. In fact, the publisher describes it as a ‘queer retelling of the classic novel‘.

It was quite different to the earlier one although still set in Regency times and including some of the characters as secondaries. However, I do like the fact that the female protagonist is both clever and resilient, despite her role as the downtrodden poor relation.

Fanny Price, is the niece-by-marriage of Sir Thomas Bertram, and has lived at Mansfield Park for most of her life. While her cousins and aunts treat her abominably, her uncle has always been kind so when he has a terrible,and fatal, fall down the steps of his art warehouse, and Fanny suspects it is not an accident, she becomes an investigator.

She enlists the aid of her cousin (and secret crush), Edmund but when the Crawfords, brother and sister, arrive, her entire emotional balance, and her belief in her cousin’s ethics, is thrown out of kilter by beautiful Mary Crawford. Enlisting the support of her uncle’s lawyer, Lizzie Bennett, and her assistant, Fitzwilliam Darcy, not only is Sir Bertram’s murder proven, but also a huge art fraud uncovered, with Fanny only just avoiding becoming the next victim.

It is a fun and undemanding read for anyone with a fondness for twisted classics and mysteries, particularly if they also enjoy LGBQT+ fiction. I’m giving it a 3 🔪🔪🔪 rating for readers from around lower secondary upwards.