Central Kansas Library System

Molly Pohlig's The Unsuitable is a fierce blend of Gothic ghost story and Victorian novel of manners that's also pitch perfect for our current cultural moment. Iseult Wince is a Victorian woman perilously close to spinsterhood whose distinctly unpleasant father is trying to marry her off. She is awkward, plain, and most pertinently, believes that her mother, who died in childbirth, lives in the scar on her neck. Iseult's father parades a host of unsuitable...

Annie and Fannie are twins and the youngest of twelve siblings. They're in the little Amish school's Christmas play, which they must practice for regularly, but what they're really passionate about is horses. Oh, what they would give to have a horse of their own to ride and groom and care for. It's all they can think about. Well, that and the way their older sister Anna is swooning over Isaac, a sixteen-year-old boy who goes to the hymn singings on...

Twenty-seven-year-old Anne Elliot is Austen's most adult heroine. Eight years before the story proper begins, she is happily betrothed to a navel officer, Frederick Wentworth, but she precipitously breaks off the engagement when persuaded by her friend Lady Russell that such a match is "unworthy." The breakup produces in Anne a deep and long-lasting regret. When later Wentworth returns from sea a rich and successful captain, he finds Anne's family...