Kate Watson

I think I would've enjoyed this more if I didn't love Mansfield Park so much. This is a fairly thorough retelling, nailing many of the details that even the film adaptations have ignored, but in making it more modern, much of what I loved about Fanny and her character has been significantly downplayed and even lost.

Fanny Price is a non-entity, a convenient nothing, a plain, easily ignored girl taken on charity. And she's aware of it all the time...aware of her duty to her family, to contribute to their happiness if she can. And yet, when the time comes for her to cave to their expectations, she cannot compromise her own ethics. Because Fanny Price is also a stubborn, moral stick-in-the-mud possessing more wisdom than anyone wants to admit, and she trusts herself even when no one will listen.

I love that Fanny Price. Socially oppressed, ignored except when convenient, she nonetheless finds something of value within herself and refuses to relinquish it. Finley Price, on the other hand, is glossy and beautiful with social cachet in spades if she chooses to use it. A history of abuse has left her timid and unwilling to trust herself, and so she looks outward for approval and submits to others' expectations and needs like some kind of martyr.

I understand why Watson wrote her this way. It's a lot more complicated to write about societal pressure and marginalization today than it was in Jane Austen's time. (Though not impossible.) And so why not flip the source of conflict from external pressure to internal instability? But I wanted to read a Mansfield Park retelling with Fanny Price in it, not Finley. I wanted her wise and stodgy and plain and fighting for herself.

Every scene where Finley huddles deeper into herself, lets others make her choices for her, refuses to assert her beliefs, even gently; every scene when someone comments on her beauty and her charm and how many dudes want to date her; every scene when she patches together the life she's always wanted from the shards of her broken past, when she "finds" herself and "heals"...every scene I spent with Finley, I was imagining how it could've been with Fanny instead. And I missed her. In her own retelling, I missed her.… (mais)

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Flux books for allowing me to read and review “Shoot the Moon” by Kate Watson. What an insightful look at addiction. I can’t remember the last time I read a book that so deeply takes us into the numbing, heart-pounding world of brain-chemistry changing addiction, where just the mention of a trigger, a let-down during the course of the day, or just not having enough to DO can cause that itch to beg incessantly to be scratched. Kate Watson illustrated that so beautifully through Tate’s struggles and eventual management of his disease.

And the plotting and narrative of this was so nicely done. I loved the creativity in the characters of the Wolfs, of Alex, the angry daughter who is out to hurt everyone she touches, the toxic parents, the campaign pitting two relatives by marriage against one another that exposes all sorts of dirt. The mafia and the secrets that they hold and use. This was entertaining and brilliantly plotted. An entertaining treat from start to finish.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the author.

Please excuse typos. Entered on screen reader.… (mais)