Emerald

A Universal Truth #1

by Sarah Bevan Fischer

The Bennet sisters are wildly different, products of a marriage in terminal decay. Emerald is loosely based on the famous and much loved classic precursor Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Emerald echoes the 200-year-old novel but is widely different and is how I imagine the story may pan out in the 21st century.

The story follows the lives of the five daughters of the Bennet family. Jade is completing her nursing training and has elected to move home to Oxford for her final year. Emy (short for Emerald, yes Mrs Bennet did go through a phase) finishes University and returns home for the holidays with her best friend Scarlett Lucas. Meanwhile Jade and Emy’s younger two siblings, Lara and Kylie aspire to celebrity status through that TV talent show, shamelessly encouraged by their mother. The middle sister Meg Ann lectures her siblings from the moral high ground at every opportunity.

Scarlett invites Emy and Jade down to the Lucas family’s holiday home in Cornwall where the girls are invited to lunch with long time friends of Scarlett’s parents. Scarlett has had a crush on Ashley Brooks for years. During the holiday the girls are thrown in the way of Ashley’s seriously wealthy and rather pompous cousin, Matthew Brooks Devonshire and his best friend Sam Bradford.

Jade and Sam are immediately attracted to each other. Emy, conversely, forms the opinion that Matthew is an egotistical snob and eschews his company in favour of an actor, Zachary Winchester whom she meets at a beach barbecue. Oddly Matthew and Zachary appear to have met before….

Tensions run high between the rivals inadvertently stoked by Emy's innocent flirtation and Amelia Bradford's jealous slander. When Emy and Matt meet once more in different circumstances Emy comes to realise that her prejudice against him may have been ill founded.

Emerald is Book 1 of a 2 Book Series (A Universal Truth)

225 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 9, 2014

About the author

I have been an avid reader all of my life. I wrote my first story aged eight and have never really stopped since. I became interested in fashion and design at school and my ambition was then to become a designer. I learned fashion and textile design at Art College and from there entered the fashion retail sector as a trainee manager.
I have had a busy career in which I have learned the essence of fashion and retailing, business and management skills. I spent ten years as a teacher, and have written articles, regular features, and a blog for many years.
My long held ambition to write has come to fulfillment in the last few years. Drawing on my experience 'Palmerstone' was born. The independent retail business founded by the fictitious character Rebecca sits at the core of the Palmerstone and Friends and Palmerstone and Company books.
I loved writing Palmerstone and Friends and I had high hopes that readers would love the characters as much as I had loved writing them. Caitlin, Rebecca, Suzanne and Penny have been my imaginary friends for a long time. I always had the intention of continuing the stories with the younger characters to the fore. The warm and supportive feedback that I have received from many of you has inspired me to crack on with the next story -Palmerstone and Company.
Palmerstone and Company features the children of the older generation of characters, and some others. The stories flit from character to character as the story follows different lives and loves. Above all the plots entwine and encompass friendships old and new. There is some heartbreak along the way, yet these stories are of love and laughter, life and all its challenges, but most of all love; and fashion of course.
My sincere thanks go to all of you who have followed my stories. Particularly thanks to those of you who have taken the time and effort to give your very valuable feedback. Writing can be a lonely business, a word of praise or a constructive criticism are always welcome.

Reviews

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the story. It's a very modern, very different spin on Pride and Prejudice where the recognizable events don't happen in the same order and certainly not in the same way. The Charlotte Lucas and Colonel Fitzwilliam characters (who in this book are named Scarlett and Ashley, respectively) feature more prominently; they quickly become a couple as the book begins. Emerald, or Emy (Elizabeth Bennet) has just finished school and is career oriented in the publishing field. She and her sister Jade (Jane Bennet) come from a family even more dysfunctional than the Bennets. I won't go into detail about the similarities and differences from P&P as Emy's path keeps coming across Matthew Brooks Devonshire (Mr. Darcy). However, I will say that, as in Jane Austen's book, even though they're apart more than they're together, there's a definite connection.

I enjoyed this plot a lot and would give the storyline alone a 5-star rating, despite the cliffhanger ending. (I'm moving on to "Master of Pemberlane," the sequel to this book, on the strength of the story.)

Unfortunately, I found a number of issues with the writing. Even with a list of characters linked to their P&P counterparts preceding the book, there are too many names thrown out in the first chapters with no explanation whatsoever of who they are. (Neighbors? Family members? Friends?) It took me a long time to get a good handle on everyone's relationship with everyone else, considering that they're NOT presented at the same points in the story as in the original. For example, I couldn't make out who Lily was, or even her relationship with the main characters. (As it turns out, she's a contemporary Anne deBourgh, but the characterization here is markedly different.) Nicknames are also somewhat baffling the first time you come across them: "Lee" for Ashley; "Carle" for Scarlett.

More disturbing is the lack of good punctuation and grammar throughout. Sentences often end in commas rather than periods or they don't end at all, with sentences all mashed together. Commas are often left out where they're needed. Obviously, this makes it difficult to determine the intended meaning in quite a few places.

I think this author has wonderful ideas with a reasonably well-constructed book here. She would benefit greatly from collaboration with a good editor.

As mentioned above, this is a two-part series. You can get both books together in "A Universal Truth - Compendium Edition."

[Carol Perrin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Emerald ( A Universal Truth )

Very interesting modern variation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. All of the characters are in this story, but names have been changed. Caroline and Wickham's characters have new names, but that didn't help disguise them at all. The Bennet family members are a mess more so than in Austen's original. If you thought they were nonfunctional before, this modern family is an absolute mess, except for Emerald and Jade. Jade is a nurse and Emerald is working in publishing and both of them have tried to keep the family together without much luck. Just as Emerald finds herself in love with Matthew Brooks Devonshire, a family crisis pulls her away from Pemblane, Matt's historical home in Derbyshire. Driving Emy home after a call from Jade, she has a strange feeling that she'll not be seeing him again after the latest family fiasco. Sure enough, when she returns to work there is a letter on her desk telling her that he needs to fly to France and then Australia. As she gets ready to turn off her computer, an email from Simon and Schuster in New York offers her a job. She sure she's lost everything in England, so she makes up her mind to get away from it all, but at the same time is torn with indecision. This is the end of Book 1. Cannot wait to finish the story in Book 2.

[Sarah Fischer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well obviously this is my baby!!