First Night Design | Jane Austen Gets Drunk

Fabulous post – a rarely seen side of #JaneAusten!

First Night Design

1810 sketch of Jane Austen by her sister, Cassandra.

Forget the shy, retiring Jane Austen — we have her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh’s memoir of his aunt to blame for that idea — here is an extract from a letter she wrote from Steventon to her sister Cassandra on 20th November, 1880, after attending a ball. Austen liked to have fun. No one who can write so amusingly and with such charming detail about life and society in her books could have led a reclusive life devoid of society.

“I believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne; I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand to-day. […] There were very few beauties, and such as there were were not very handsome. Miss Iremonger did not look well, and Mrs. Blount was the only one much admired. She appeared exactly as she did in September, with…

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‘Final Girls’ by Riley Sager #TuesdayBookBlog #BookReview

Amazon.co.uk   Amazon.com

FIRST THERE WERE THREE

The media calls them the Final Girls – Quincy, Sam, Lisa – the infamous group that no one wants to be part of. The sole survivors of three separate killing sprees, they are linked by their shared trauma.

THEN THERE WERE TWO

But when Lisa dies in mysterious circumstances and Sam shows up unannounced on her doorstep, Quincy must admit that she doesn’t really know anything about the other Final Girls. Can she trust them? Or…

CAN THERE ONLY EVER BE ONE?

All Quincy knows is one thing: she is next.

I’m trying very hard to avoid all these books that have ‘girl’ or ‘girls’ in the title (we’re WOMEN ffs!) but I read this for two reasons. Firstly, it sounded brilliant and secondly, there’s a very good reason that it’s called ‘Final Girls’.

If you love horror movies you’ll know that the ’final girl’ is the last girl left standing once everyone else has been murdered. The term was coined by Carol J Clover in her 1992 book ‘Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film’ and in Sager’s book, Quincy, Sam and Lisa are ‘real’ final girls (in the reality of the book).

The main focus is on Quincy. She is the sole survivor of a horrific massacre carried out on a group of teenagers in a cabin (well, a cottage, anyway) in the woods. She can’t remember everything that happened that night, and she hates being associated with the other Final Girls. And she seems to be coping – she has a home, a successful and loving boyfriend, and she’s developing a food blog. She does take rather a lot of Xanax, and she also keeps in touch with Coop, a policeman involved in the case, but she’s trying to put it all behind her. Then Lisa dies, and Sam turns up. Quincy’s fragile façade starts to fall apart. She finds herself more and more influenced by Sam, and more and more drawn into what has really happened to Lisa, and what really happened that night at Pine Cottage.

There are so many twists and turns here. Just when you think you’ve solved the mystery, that you know what the twist is, you realise you’re wrong. It’s skilfully done and makes this a real page-turner.

The characters are all really well-written and very believable. I didn’t like Quincy all that much –but I didn’t find that a problem. She frustrated me at times, and I was practically screaming at her not to do the things she was about to do – but the fact that she provoked such a strong reaction goes to show how well she was written.

There are some really tense moments, and genuine shocks and surprises. It’s a really intense, gripping and enjoyable read.

Recommended.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy for review.