MADreads

Literary fiction at its flirty best

May 30th, 2006 Molly - Central

What do you get when you combine college entrance excitement, long lost loves and a failing family fortune? It’s Jane Austen in Scarsdale: Or Love, Death, and the SATs.

This latest offering by Paula Marantz Cohen follows Fenimore High School guidance counselor Anne Erlich as she tries to soothe the frantic parents of students gearing up for college admissions while mending broken fences with ‘the one that got away’ during her own college years. As her namesake did in Persuasian, earnest Anne discovers that Ben Cutler, the boy her family deemed unworthy of her affection thirteen years ago has returned to Westchester and is now a rich man and doting uncle of a Fenimore student. If the reader is familiar with Persuasian, they will know how this tale ends, but as they say, it is all in the getting there. After much angst (teenage and otherwise), an uppity poetry party and a few errant guns for hire (padding college applications), our modern day Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth finally figure it out.

Cohen’s earlier work, Jane Austen in Boca, rivals Pride in Prejudice in wit and false assumptions, with a group of Jewish retirees living in Boca Raton, Florida dating, mating and making hilarity. Literary fiction at its flirty best.

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction, Romance