This witchy reimagining of Pride and Prejudice was such a treat! This was told from the eye of Lydia, often seen as the troublesome Bennet sister. I’ll admit that Lydia (and Mary) are frequently my least favorite sisters so I was hesitant to read a book that placed the spotlight on Lydia. I was I credibly wrong to feel this way about this book, because it was so amazing! I’m hesitant to reveal too much about the plot because I feel the surprise value of finding out as you read this one is best. This was such a brilliant interpretation of Jane Austen’s work.

I liked Lydia's lively narrative voice. Her energy is addictive and her tongue-in-cheek humor breaks whatever counts as the fourth wall equivalent in books. The spell and hex work feel fresh and creative, and there's a lot of charm in the story overall. I don't mind the slow pace, I think it suits this particularly narrative style very well. But I do think the book is too long.

If you know the major plot points and characters of P&P, then you should find the re-spun details in Lydia's entertaining voice enjoyable.

I enjoy retellings and have been reading more and more P&P.

This was a super fun read! I loved the writing style and the author did their due diligence for this story.
I loved the witchy element, which is what grabbed my attention TBH.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for the advanced copy in exchange for my review.

This Pride and Prejudice retelling is literally perfect for fans of Practical Magic. I was honestly surprised by how much I enjoyed it, and the author was able to make it fun and witchy without being cheesy.

This was a wonderful read and a great take on history. The story flowed nicely and the characters kept you interested throughout the book. I would buy a copy for myself.

This book was fantastic! It takes Lydia Bennet, the most maligned Bennet sister from Pride and Prejudice, and gives her a whole world to explore. It develops her character while staying within the bounds of what happened in the original Austen work, and I love a retelling. Lydia is such a great POV character, because she knows she's done some things wrong, but is determined to write them down anyway. The whole book is written from her perspective, and it bounces back and forth between present-day Lydia, down on her luck, and the Lydia of the past, who is making the mistakes that lead her to the present. The parallel storylines are great, if slightly hard to follow at times. It was a great way to keep me hooked so that I was always eager to find out what was happening in the other story, since she tends to switch off on cliffhangers.
Lydia's voice is very modern, which made the book easier to read, though it was jarring to see lines from P&P in the book since they didn't quite fit. But I'll take easy-to-read over period-accurate! I took off a star because it is slow to start, and it took me a little while to feel really invested and like the story was going somewhere. But it is an immensely enjoyable read and by the end I was very caught up in everything!

I absolutely loved this book! It is one of the best Pride and Prejudice variations that I have read in a long time and I have read many! Darcy, dragons, magic, familiars, Brighton... it is all there. While completely fantastically, it was also deeply rooted in the source material and added flavor to it. What a wonderful literary fusion!

If any of the Bennet sisters was a practicing witch, it would be Lydia Bennet.

It took me awhile to get into it - particularly the beginning where Lydia is retelling the events of Pride & Prejudice that we’re all familiar with, but it gets far more interesting when Lydia goes off on her first adventure to Brighton.

The writing is very good - Lydia as a narrator gets sidetracked easily which is sometimes frustrating - and the new characters introduced are very fun. The magic system stems from traditional British myth, which I’m very pleased by - if the author had attempted to create a unique magic system, it would’ve been way too much.

Overall this book was pretty fun! A great read for any Austen fan.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is a fun historical fiction - retelling of Pride and prejudice focused on Lydia with a little witch thrown in. The the plot is fun. Overall an excellent reading experience.

I was so excited by the premise of The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch. I love when a secondary character gets new life in an interesting way and author Melinda Taub exceeded my hopes. The story is delightful and this retelling with Lydia being a witch fit into the story of Pride and Prejudice in a way that felt natural. From the true story of Kitty, who is actually a cat, to Wickham's real place in Lydia's life, this is a creative, funny, adventure, full of depth and intelligence.

I enjoyed how the back bone of the familiar story of Pride and Prejudice started us off with all of Lydia's uncensored thoughts about her family as well as some witchy meddling in recognizable events. As the story deepens we are shown what really went on while Lydia was in Brighton and how she grows into a woman with heart and courage. I can't recommend this book enough!

Thank you Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley for the advanced reader copy! This is my honest review.

This was such an enjoyable retelling! I loved the author’s writing style, characterization, and descriptive scenery. I received this eARC for my unbiased opinion from NetGalley. Thank you!

The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet- Witch by Melinda Taub

*Review based on an Advanced Review Copy provided by Grand Central Publishing

“Everyone is living out a story of their own, and you only get to read the pages you appear on” -Lydia Bennet

Oh, man. You know those books that, when you turn the last page, you feel regret, like an old friend is leaving and you’ll never see them again, and their visit passed all too quickly?

This is one of those books. I was so sorry to see it end that I read all the way through the author’s notes, and enjoyed those, also.

Scandalous is great fun, and a wholly original retelling of Pride & Prejudice from an unusual perspective, that of scapegrace Lydia Bennet.

Part of what makes this book so charming is that it deviates from the tradition of the lead being convinced of their own moral rectitude and the author’s desire to make them be good and kind, and just to everyone. Lydia is redeemable, but chooses her own path, and it’s the right path for a TERRIFIC book.

Kitty is completely wonderful, it’s a real joy to see life breathed into a character that’s usually left as two dimensional. I also found this new take on Wickham interestingly gray in morality.

But this version of Lydia is even better. Taub has succeeded in bringing the light hearted joie de vivre that Austen tempered with callous disregard into bright, clear focus, but rather than moralizing against the pursuit of joy and fun, Taub’s Lydia has heart, a conscience, and a great deal of honesty and courage, but also doesn’t see any reason why a person can’t have fun, and bend the rules…just a tiny bit. Even if the results are terrible, it’s all part of life, right?

This book is interesting. In ways that mashups generally are not. Yes, there’s the great good fun of revisiting a beloved world, but this take brings in so much additional, beautifully researched, real history that is perfectly integrated into the imaginary world that Scandalous stands as a complete novel in and of itself, and fully realized world that is unique and colorful and well worth visiting.

Five drops of magical seawater: Do not miss this book!

If you enjoy retellings of Pride and Prejudice, this book is for you!
It puts Lydia and Kitty front and center, with Lydia as a witch and the narrator. In general people tend to not like Lydia but she is a fun, quirky witch in this book.
Great banter and it’s fun to read Lydia’s thoughts about her sisters, parents and the husbands. I recommend!

The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch moves a bit slowly, as it's half Pride and Prejudice retelling and half sequel, told entirely in letters, one of which is mostly a memoir-type manuscript. For me, this slows things down considerably, but I still loved every second of it.

Lydia Bennet is the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter (she explains this, delightfully), which makes her a witch. So begins the retelling of Pride and Prejudice, only the events have been given witchy explanations as Lydia attempts to save herself and her familiar from the clutches of an ancient magic and the ancient magic's son, a dashing and demonic Wickham. The fallout necessitates the writing of this manuscript, in which Lydia explains everything that happened to her, why it happened, and how she goes from the most annoying of the Bennet sisters to the most compelling.

What's deeply fascinating about The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet is how Lydia can effortlessly critique Pride and Prejudice, its characters (her father is a monster, Lizzy is forever condescendingly judgy), and the society in which it operates, and be completely in step with Jane Austen herself while also being thoroughly modern.

In short, this is a fun read. I'm glad Melinda Taub has finally gifted us a second novel. May this one have a better run as a tv show than her first.

I've been re-reading Austen lately; like any longtime reader and writer of fanfic, I'm always curious about the secondary characters and the stories that the original creator didn't tell. What, then, was a novelist going to do with Lydia Bennet, that foolish little flibbertigibbet, and the dreadful George Wickham?

Well! Melinda Taub did quite a lot, as it turns out. I hesitate to say anything about the plot, because reading without advance notice of any developments got me surprise after pleased surprise, but it's not giving away more than a hint to say that Kitty Bennet is, literally, a kitty, and that George Wickham is literally-not-figuratively a handsome devil. Also, readers of Austen may be reassured to know that Taub is good at period idiom -- I spotted scarcely any missteps -- and at reconciling Lydia Bennet the witch with Lydia Bennet the blithering idiot ("La! Imagine what Lizzy would do if she knew I made that spot on her chin pop back out whenever she vexed me"). Lydia grows and changes, of course, and a good thing too, because who could stand a couple of hundred pages of squealing about hair ribbons and handsome officers?

"What they ought to do is tell us what the really big mistakes are — the ones that will end life as we know it.
Lord, maybe they did tell me. I probably wasn’t paying attention."

Scandalous Confessions often made me smile, snort, laugh outright:

"[Georgiana Darcy's] version of mathematics contains almost no numbers at all, just a series of letters of different sizes that she calls variables. Some of them are Greek, which seems excessive."

And, on how well Mr. Collins and Mary Bennet would be suited:

"They liked all the same things. They could live out their days quite happily, quoting sermons to each other and abstaining from reading novels."

I picked up callouts to Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Sanditon, and no doubt I missed some. But isn't it nice when a writer makes her readers feel clever?

If I have an objection, it's that aspects of the resolution could be read as setting aside bonds with women in favor of a bond with a man. There are reasons to resist that reading, but to lay them out would entail far too many spoilers, so I'll ding an invisible quarter of a star and close by saying I enjoyed the devil out of Lydia's confessions.

Beyond my wildest expectations! I have read a LOT of Austen-inspired books in the past, and they are usually... not great. But this was so perfect, so sharp and funny with the best Lydia voice you could imagine, and just has a wonderful time spiraling away from the central P&P story into the delightful question of 'what if Lydia was a witch and Kitty was her familiar that everyone just thought was another sister?' I mean it was perfect. A zillion stars.

I never liked Lydia.

Until now.

This book was FUN. The author took her time in researching and really getting the story we all love- and making it engaging, vibrant, and funny. The unlikeable became charming. Witches, familiars, a story we all love- and strong women and friendship - I am here for it!!!


Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me an arc in exchange for my honest opinion!

What an absolute delight and treat this book was! I love P&P and have read it tons of times, so I'm not easily won over by bad take-offs. But this was fantastic. I feel like I got to return to the beloved world of the original but also to see behind the curtain and understand a totally different version of some of the events.

The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch by Melinda Taub is a whimsical and magical retelling of Jane Austen's classic novel, Pride and Prejudice. The story is told from the perspective of Lydia Bennet, the youngest and most troublesome Bennet sister, who reveals the real events and aftermath of the original story. Taub has done an excellent job of combining the charm and wit of Austen's writing with the magical elements of the story.

Lydia is a charming and delightful protagonist, whose antics and mischief are a constant source of entertainment. Her love interest, Wickham, is revealed to be a demon, which adds an interesting twist to the story. Darcy, on the other hand, is portrayed as an uptight and somewhat intolerant character who struggles to come to terms with the existence of magic in the world.

The plot is well-paced and full of intrigue and mystery, with a dash of romance thrown in for good measure. Taub has woven in a rich and fascinating magical world that feels both authentic and unique. The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, is a delightful and charming read that fans of Austen and magical realism will enjoy.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for the opportunity to read rage and review this arc which is available Oct 3,2023.

This reimagining of a classic story was a fun fun read. It has the charm of the classic but the sensibilities and humor of modern day. I was cackling so hard whimsy reading this book.