This change in motivations makes Anna an entirely different sort of girl. The most obvious difference of course is that everyone knew that Anne wanted to marry Wentworth he wasn’t a shameful secret. What Anne did to Wentworth was fail to trust him and to give in to an understandable societal fear what Anna did to Finn was to treat him like shit.

While I can see how LaZebnik went for this, the emotional impact is so incredibly different. Everything culminates in her dissing him publicly at the school dance. Anna fears everyone will judge her for dating a short, weedy boy with glasses, so she keeps their relationship hidden. Finn’s short and super nerdy, where Anna is popular. In The Last Best Kiss, Anna Eliot dates Finn Westbrook secretly when they’re both freshman. She didn’t make the romantic decision, but she was afraid to take what was legitimately a huge risk. She would be taking a step down in station and would have been pretty promptly left alone while he went off to sail the seas in the navy, probably with a kid and without much money. This is not, however, an illogical decision for Anne. However, Anne then caves to peer pressure from her father, sister, and friend, which leads her to break the engagement. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot accepts an offer of a marriage from Frederick Wentworth, then a poor naval officer. Getting to marry a man you loved, as Austen’s heroines did, was emotionally pretty similar to getting a job offer for your dream job. Agreeing to marry was more of a business deal with wives chosen by what they could bring to their husbands. See, marriage back then was essentially a woman’s occupation. What The Lizzie Bennet Diaries understood, as Gillian (Writer of Wrongs) has very wisely told me, is that a marriage proposal in the past is very akin to a job offer now. The biggest problem with The Last Best Kiss is how the modernization is done. I ended up somewhat liking this one only because I’ve apparently forgotten a good deal of the middle of Persuasion.

If you can’t, it’s going to be frustrating. If you are able to separate The Last Best Kiss from Persuasion, it’s a fun read, though not a great one. This retelling fails to capture the emotional resonances of the original. Oh, LaZebnik puts all the things in basically the right places they’re very clearly retellings. That book is a mess and changes only improve it. The difference between her Mansfield Park retelling and the other two (Pride and Prejudice in Epic Fail and Persuasion in The Last Best Kiss) is that I didn’t care and in fact thought it was awesome that she made alterations to Mansfield Park. For more reviews, Cover Snark and more, visit A Reader of Fictions.Īt this point, it’s seeming as though my love of LaZebnik’s The Trouble with Flirting may have been a fluke.

The last best kiss by claire lazebnik