This guest review comes from Lisa! A longtime romance aficionado and frequent commenter to SBTB, Lisa is a queer Latine critic with a sharp tongue and lots of opinions. She frequently reviews at All About Romance and Women Write About Comics, where she’s on staff, and you can catch her at @‌thatbouviergirl on Twitter. There, she shares good reviews, bracing industry opinions and thoughtful commentary when she’s not on her grind looking for the next good freelance job.

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There’s a thick difference between making a series of cute Pride and Prejudice references in your book and ladling reference after reference over the text. Hearth or Heart is blessed with a fun, funny, tough heroine. But she is no Lizzie Bennet, and this novel would have done well not to constantly remind us of her while trying to build this heroine her own universe.

The Bowmans are another passel of daughters with a poor financial outlook and a flustered and henpecking mother, only here there are nine sisters here to the Bennet’s five. Eldest Persephone, called Effie, is horrified when she’s told she’s about to be limited to 20 pounds in pin money a month by her aunt, Mrs. Thornby. There are no brothers nor any husbands in the family yet, something Mrs. Thornaby is hoping to change.

Mrs. Thornaby has been administering the small portions of the Bowman girls’ inheritance in the absence of a proper custodian. She has a son, James, and now that he is back in London, he will be the custodian. Mrs. Thornby believes that Effie will straighten out her boy and make him a man, if only she will marry him. Effie is thinking of Mrs. Thornaby’s scheme when she encounters an urchin named Georgy fighting with a collie dog for scraps in a park in the West End of London. As she pulls them apart, she literally bumps into Sir John Callendar — one of the ton’s most eligible widowers.

Sir John wants nothing to do with the lively, opinionated Effie at first; she is ‘merely tolerable’ to him (groan). Effie soon becomes attached to Georgy, whom Sir John places in a nearby school and takes in as a companion for his son. Effie continues to visit Georgy and bond with him when he’s in the schoolroom at John’s estate. She also becomes fond of Sir John’s sickly son Edmund, and claims the collie as her own, naming it Bobble.

When she meets James, Effie soon realizes that he is too blustery and frank to ever meet with the ton’s approval, and sets about trying to help shape him into a proper gentleman. When he meets the acquaintanceship of Charlotte Forson, Effie helps James set his cap for her while dealing with her conflicted feelings for Sir John. But trouble soon arrives, and when Effie is kidnapped, Sir John must show what he’s made of.

Hearth or Heart has some very fun points: Effie is indomitable and her spirit is fantastic. I enjoyed her whenever she was onscreen. She’s the big reason this doesn’t get a same-old-same-old blah C- or a D. Some elements of the plot were fun, too – Effie taking over and remaking James versus the woman in the book facing a makeover was great – and a fine gesture toward another Austen book, Emma. I also liked the two of them steadfastly resisting a first cousin marriage, even though his mother keeps trying to talk them into it.

I also really liked both children in the book, who were funny and spirited in their own ways. Sir John’s fussiness could be really funny, but it was James who definitely won me over with his big heart and bluster. And the romance between our hero and heroine is very cute, though it’s nothing to write home about.

On the other hand, the Pride and Prejudice references were much too much, especially when it came to direct line pulls. For instance: Effie is told she has fine eyes; Sir John proclaims her ‘tolerable.’ The sickly, dithering matchmaking mother also calls Mrs. Bennet to mind. The large family of girls, the interfering mothers and aunts. I yearned for more originality in the setup. Though the plot manages to stand up on its own three chapters deep, that might be too late for some readers. Some of these elements are shed as the novel goes on but it’s too little, too late by then.

Also please stop telling me about Effie’s aquiline nose! It comes up every other paragraph. I might have created a drinking game for every single mention of it.

And for a book that’s about nine sisters, Effie’s eight other siblings are only used sparingly in the narrative; we see them occasionally in ball scenes and they are introduced fairly early in the novel, but otherwise barely come up or draw any attention.

Another problem with the prose also popped up early on: the writing style is very adverb-heavy, and this sometimes bogs down the pace of the writing. Everything is described so lavishly that one must pause for paragraphs to absorb what was written. While sometimes the writing dazzled in a way that kept me fascinated, more often I found it distracting.

Our villain here is also a bit of a big let-down, mostly because their motive (which I won’t reveal here for spoiler’s sake) didn’t work for me.

That’s why Hearth or Heart gets a mid-level score for me. It was too good to get a lower score, but not good enough to get a B or higher. All in all, I was definitely left with some mixed opinions. It’s entertaining and has warm spots, so it’s not a total waste of time, and the series could turn into something charming with a little bit of tight editing. But I do hope the next story in this percolating series doesn’t center itself around the themes of another Austen novel. In any event I’ll be keeping an eye on the Bowman family with distant, if fond, curiosity.