BEING MARY BENNET BLOWS
Book 2 in the Bennet Sisters series
Seventeen-year-old Mary Bennet wishes Jane Austen had never written The Book. Everyone knows the hideous fate Jane Austen dumped on Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice — dull, ugly, obnoxiously brainy, and piano-playing — and it seems to be dictating Mary’s life. She’s sick of being that Mary Bennet. She's ready to raise a little hell.
But will anyone let her? She can’t change how she looks without every kid in school laughing. Her mom refuses to let her ditch piano for electric guitar. And when a brainy guy with a skateboard rides into her life, can she trust him not to make her the biggest joke in school? With a little help from her sisters, she’s about to find out.
Being Mary Bennet Blows is available in print and ebook on Amazon Kindle, Apple iBooks, Nook, Kobo, and more.
An Excerpt from BEING MARY BENNET BLOWS
Don’t call me Ishmael. Call me MB.
Except nobody ever does call me MB, and none of the idiots at my high school have a clue who Ishmael is. On a good day, people call me Mary, or Mary Bennet, but mostly they just ignore me. I’m seventeen, my birthday is next month, and I’m a senior at Woodbury High School, a half hour east of Minneapolis, close to the Wisconsin border. But that’s not my problem.
My problem is Jane Austen.
Jane set me up, with help from my mom, who put one over on my dad. Actually, Mom put five of us over on him: Jane, Liz, me, Cat, and Lydia. The Bennet sisters. Two hundred years after Jane Austen wrote The Book, as my sister Liz calls Pride and Prejudice, we got screwed. At least, I did.
If you’ve read The Book, and I don’t recommend it, you know that the Mary Bennet of The Book is the definition of No Hope. When I read The Book at age twelve, I first knew horror. Even by then, my older sisters Jane and Liz were already becoming the annoyingly perfect Jane and Elizabeth of The Book, and Lydia was an insufferable brat. Cat? Hard to say at that point, but she giggled a lot.
Meanwhile, I got stuck being Mary. Dull. Unattractive. Smart. Piano-playing. I don’t mind being smart, but the rest of it totally blows. Once I saw the writing on the wall—in black indelible marker—I started dressing in baggy clothes, didn’t bother with hair or makeup or cute shoes or nail polish, and even let my mom do a cram-down with piano lessons when I’d rather play electric guitar. Why bother fighting fate?
But fate just keeps getting nastier.
Today was the first day of school, and my family basically forgot, what with Lydia starting her first day of reform school today. In Montana. She left last Friday under police escort, and Mom practically organized a stupid parade in her honor. Of course, Mom doesn’t know it’s reform school. Even though she’s the lawyer in the family, Dad somehow managed to hide that pesky little detail from her.
Dad didn’t tell Cat or me, either, but I listened in when he told Liz and Jane. Now the whole school seems to know, so Cat must know, too. She’s a junior here at Woodbury High, and her day can’t be much better than mine.
And it’s only lunchtime.
Another girl just stopped by my table in the cafeteria, where I always sit alone. She was skinny with perky boobs and long bleached-blond hair, so she must be a cheerleader. “Is it true about your sister? Lydia’s your sister, right? Like, you’re a Bennet?”
My bologna sandwich halted halfway to my mouth, but then I took a big bite out of it and choked on the five-hundred-grain granola bread my mom bought as part of her latest diet. It’s like chewing on a pine tree. “MB.”
She just stared at me, like she’d never heard the initials MB. I also wasn’t exactly sure what she’d heard about Lydia, but it couldn’t be good. It never was.
“You’re Lydia Bennet’s sister?”
I shrugged. My bologna sandwich stuck to the roof of my mouth and wasn’t budging.