FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The middle child of five in a middle-class home, 15-year-old Alice is so involved in the plight of Mary, the middle sister in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, that she can’t see the trajectory of the story and gets a C on her report. Alice is a straight-A student, so is given the chance to rewrite—and reread—Austen over Christmas. Austen, however, manages to get Alice through her siblings’ travails, from the gorgeous Olivia to the 11-year-old twins; from Christmas shopping to finding she really has a best friend; and from her first boyfriend to her first New Year’s Eve party. Along the way, Alice discovers that her parents are people, that you can find out about sex in the 18th-century on the Internet and that having a best friend is complicated. Told in Alice’s plainspoken voice, Sachs uses Austen as a leitmotif, and even lets Alice and her boyfriend Kevin appear in Austen’s narrative now and then, a trope Jasper Fforde has made perhaps a bit too familiar. But she also provides enough phone chat, mall shopping and family lore to make it all sweetly contemporary and much fun to read. (Fiction. 11-14)