Hirondelle (not getting all notifications)’s Reviews > Northanger Abbey > Status Update

Starts with a banger first line, ends with a banger last line which gives more meaning to plot.

As perfect a novel as any I have read. It's not a romance, not really, really, but I did not needed it to be. And it is so so good at so many things I love the unreliable narrator, the humor, the breaking the 4th wall, the awareness of genre tropes and intentionally breaking them...

I am reading a version with an unusual (original?) punctuation, and OMG Jane Austen loved hyphens even more than ChatGPT does. (and think drunk ChatGPT using hiphens). The punctuation!! I expect it was realistic and well, people squeezing more emotion somehow out of letters and symbols is something done in new ways in all generations ;)

I was thinking surely JA had not read D. Quixote but then googling it, oh of course it was known and had influence on other books (and it totally feels like it). It is so meta, so pro genre fiction and well just my cup of tea so far.

I react unexpectedly on rereads, this is one of those which is being so much more fun than expected...

Me starting S&S was a false alarm, swapped instead for convenience, will get S&S later on. A reread, but the Austen book I remember less well and have less feelings for!

It will take me a while probably!