Blog Tour: Miriam – Linda O’Byrne – Bookshine And Readbows

*I received a free copy of this book with thanks to the author and to Zoé of Zooloo’s Book Tours and SpellBound Books. The decision to review and my opinions are my own.*

Blurb: Many years have passed since the dramatic events of Pride and Prejudice. In The Cousins of Pemberley series we follow a new generation of heroines – cousins with lives as different and interesting as those enjoyed by their mothers.

Mary Bennet – overlooked, laughed at, despised – married a missionary and vanished into a life of service out in Africa. But now Miriam, her daughter, is coming to England, disliking everything she has been told about her family.

Her aunts and cousins are expecting someone quiet, dull and bookish, just like her mother, not the quick-tempered, impulsive girl who arrives.

How can this adventurous girl with her desire for freedom possibly fit into their well ordered world? And what havoc will she cause as she tries?

Book 4: Jane, Coming Christmas 2022

This is the third book in The Cousins of Pemberley series, bringing us a new generation of Bennet romantic heroines, as well as providing sneak peaks into the futures of our old favourites.

Although each of the books features recurring characters – Mr and Mrs Darcy, the Bingleys, Bennetta – they can definitely be read as stand-alone stories. Personally, though, I think you get the best benefit from reading them in the order they were released, as the previous heroines make cameos in the newer releases, so you get a building family, layer-upon-layer of Bennet branches in the family tree.

With her unusual upbringing, with the most conservative of the Bennet sisters as a mother but also the freedom to run wild under African skies, Miriam is very different from her Pemberley Cousin predecessors so far (Cassandra and Catherine) and a large part of the story is her struggle to reconcile her tempestuous personality and longing for freedom with the more restrictive mores of genteel English society. I honestly would have expected Lizzie to have more sympathy with this, but then, perhaps the cares of motherhood and managing a large estate have somewhat relieved her own chafing against traditional views (we all have to grow up!).

It wasn’t hard to guess who would be the true love here and who would turn out to be an unscrupulous blackguard, but it was fun watching the events unfold and waiting for the various shoes to drop. Plus, we get a little preview of an upcoming plot, as Anne and Jane Darcy appear to vie over the attentions of the same gentleman in the background while Miriam’s adventure stays firmly in the spotlight. And of course, Benetta Darcy has a hand in how things turn out, again. I do hope she is set to get her own grand romance, as she has turned out to be so adept at meddling in other peoples’!

In fact, I’m looking forward to all forthcoming books in this series, and would happily continue to read about Bennet granddaughters and great-grandaughters as the family gradually draws nearer to modern times.

Anyone looking for gentle, clean, old-fashioned romance, with a respectful nod to Jane Austen’s most famous characters should give this series a go. After all, I declare, there is no enjoyment like reading!

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a young lady who has grown up knowing she is the plain, unloved misfit of her family, will not be a happy woman when she is older. Mary Malliot, once Mary Bennet, should have been such a woman.
– Linda O’Byrne, Miriam

Author Bio

Fiction has always been my go-to world, a place of entertainment, excitement and imagination – I am told that I wrote my first story when I was four about a lady who had twenty children! Sadly it has been lost for posterity.

I have been writing all my life in the time I could spare from having a “proper job”, mostly for children under the name of Linda Blake, stories of ballet dancers, pony riding and talking animals! Not all in the same book!

But my love of romance, a great tendency to say “What if..?” and the endearing characters of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice have now resulted in a series of books that will take the reader forward to the next generation of heroines.

I am retired, live in Kent and am a keen member of my local drama group. Directing and acting take up a lot of my time – I have been given the onerous task of writing the Christmas pantomimes – but I still need to cope with a large garden, doing daily battle with the heron who thinks my pond is his own breakfast buffet and keeping in touch with friends and family scattered all over the world.