Description
Like every book in the series, this novel can be read without reading any other books in the saga, but all the books are linked to each other. It's a fact, generally thought but never spoken, that a tale like mine... should never be told. Lauren Bennet was the youngest of five daughters and was the one who was thought to be destined for great things... only she wasn't. Wild, reckless, and careless, Lauren Bennet has lost her job, has been kicked out of school and has nowhere to turn. In an act of desperation, and to simply escape her failure of a past, she decides to join a mission unit of young adults who sign up to clean up and paint houses in destitute areas in America. Upon going, she immediately gets into trouble, but there, she finds something, and two men who refuse to allow her to fall through the cracks. On one hand she meets Dorian Darcy, Mr. Darcy's enigmatic cousin who provokes her at every turn, and then she meets a man named Whistler, a stern old man who pushes Lauren into realizing her frivolous nature. He then shows her the journals of two heroines from two different time periods that he was researching in America during the early nineteenth century: Briseis, a young colored woman in Philadelphia during the American Revolution and Harriet, an English woman who travels to America with her family before the battle of 1812. Through reading the history and inner feelings of both those women, Lauren Bennet begins to see her own life differently. Will Whistler help her patch up her soul and discover who the real Lauren Bennet is? And will Dorian Darcy teach her self-discovery, and help her to the path of true love in the end? Or will Lauren Bennet fall along a downward spiral that she has created for herself? Will Lauren Bennet be able to escape being... Lauren Bennet? Fall in love with Jane Austen's characters again, but in our modern world and with a whole new tale behind their histories.