Book Review | Reputation #20booksofsummer23

Book 9 of my summer reading challenge and one of my holiday books from last month.

Reputation
Lex Croucher

A classic romcom with a Regency-era twist, for fans of Mean Girls and Bridgerton.

Abandoned by her parents in favour of a sea view, middle class Georgiana Ellers has moved to a new town to live with her dreary aunt and uncle. At a particularly dull dinner party, she meets the enigmatic Frances Campbell, a wealthy socialite and enchanting member of the in-crowd.

Through Frances and her friends, Georgiana is introduced to a new world of wild parties, drunken debauchery, mysterious young men with strangely alluring hands, and the sparkling upper echelons of Regency society.

But high society isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and the price of entry might be more than Georgiana is willing to pay . . .

Full of lavish parties, handsome men on horseback and laugh-out-loud humour, this is the summer read everyone’s talking about.

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I do love a period drama and when I saw that Reputation was suggested as a book that fans of Bridgerton would like, I knew I would be picking it up. It certainly satisfied my craving for some regency drama, and I like that it had all the elements that I would expect but with modern mindsets and issues, which gave the story a bit of an edge.

Georgiana makes friends with a group of people who like to go to extremes and don’t get too worried about what will happen to them if they get discovered, I liked that even though George joined in with them she was still fairly sensible. She was breaking plenty of rules, but she managed to keep a bit more of a level head on her which was to her benefit at many points in the story.

The friendship group was a very mixed bunch, they were the type of people that you sometimes wondered why there were still friends, especially as certain characters could be magnetic but also monstrous to a lot of the others. There was at times an uneasy dynamic, particularly when some of the characters were at their most uncontrolled but it made for fascinating reading.

It definitely got a lot cattier and darker than I expected at points. There were some conniving characters that induced some rage in me, but it also had some funny moments and some very emotional moments. I was engaged with the story the whole way through and even though a lot of the parties the friends attended brought out the worst in them I was transfixed waiting to see what would happen next.

I enjoyed that George was both a good and bad character, she makes some questionable choices and does some mean things that show her darkest side, but she does learn from them. In the end, she chooses to do the right thing, even though it might put a dent in her reputation and does something that would take an extraordinary amount of courage no matter the time period.

This book was a lot of fun and drama, there were lots of high-stakes moments and bad behaviour but it was very enjoyable.