To celebrate the Year of Reading, The National has teamed up with Scholastic, the specialist educational publisher, to give away more than 40,000 books to schoolchildren. To find out more and enter the weekly draw to win, visit www.thenational.ae/uaereadschallenge.
Lydia: The Wild Girl of Pride and Prejudice
Natasha Farrant
Genre: Historical Fiction, Family
Age: 13 +
Fifteen year old Lydia Bennet lives in the shadows of her four older, smarter, sisters. She hates the way they always exclude her from conversations and treat her like nothing more than an annoying little sister.
Nobody, even her parents, seems to expect much from her and Lydia longs to prove that she is more than just a ditzy country girl. She yearns to ride horses and swim in the stream and do great things instead of just sitting indoor and being “ladylike” all day.
When some army officers settle in her area of Longbourn, Lydia forms a fast friendship with one, George Wickham. The two have similar spirits and get along extremely well. He teaches her to ride and barely questions her hasty decisions and poorly thought out plans.
In this retelling of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, we get to see what life may have been like for the youngest Bennet sister. The novel is written as her diary, and so we get day-by-day accounts on life in Longbourn, walks into Meryton, her new love interest and how Lydia copes with a mother who is desperate to see her daughters secure advantageous marriages.
Natasha Farrant does an excellent job of incorporating the language and lifestyle of the time period into modern English so that younger readers may understand the story. In addition, she has written Lydia as a fun, amiable character whom you can’t help but love.
Radeeyah Ebrahim is a 16-year-old student at Horizon Private School, Abu Dhabi. She blogs about books for Scholastic Middle East at http://worldofpossible.tumblr.com/
