Accomplished, by Amanda Quain, is a contemporary retelling of Pride & Prejudice focused on Georgiana Darcy. As Georgiana begins her junior year at Pemberley Academy, she struggles with the backlash against her after her brother turned in her ex-boyfriend, Wickham, for using Georgiana’s single room as a base for dealing Adderall to the student body without her knowledge. She tries to form a plan to make her brother stop worrying about her and get Wickham to leave her alone, but finds herself stumbling at every turn.

I’ve never met a Pride & Prejudice retelling I didn’t love, and this was no different.

Georgiana is a compelling character, and I really appreciated the character growth that she undergoes over the course of the story. After the death of her father when she was 12, and the subsequent abandonment of her and her brother by their mother, the two siblings have only each other, so they had a very codependent relationship for Georgiana’s first year at Pemberley. When Fitz went to Caltech on the other side of the country for her sophomore year, Georgiana got immediately wrapped up in Wickham, her childhood crush who transferred to the school that year. She doesn’t quite know how to have normal friendships, so that’s a big part of her journey as a character.

I also loved the fandom aspect of her character. She’s deeply attached to a TV show called Sage Hall, having written a lot of fanfiction for it and being very involved on Tumblr. When the pairing that she had always projected her feelings about herself and Wickham onto starts becoming canon in the current season, she finds herself forced to confront that trauma every time she engages with her favorite show, which is a really interesting exploration of the role of media as a way of engaging with our real lives, and was definitely my favorite aspect of the book.

One of the biggest aspects of Georgiana’s growth was learning to reckon with her own privilege due to her extreme wealth. She starts out the novel cognizant of it, but becomes much more aware of it over the course of the story, and it was a really nice part of her own character development.

I also really loved Georgiana’s struggle with her family legacy. She’s always been a bit of a black sheet in the family, preferring writing fanfiction and marching band to any of the more lucrative passions that a Darcy is supposed to like. She feels inferior to her brother, who’s widely regarded by the rest of the family as a perfect Darcy, and so she puts a lot of pressure on herself to be more like him, which is interesting to read about.

The other characters are all wonderful. Georgiana’s only friend (and love interest), Avery, is sweet and compelling and never afraid to confront Georgiana when she’s making a mistake. They have a wonderful friends-to-lovers slowburn, and it’s a really lovely storyline.

Fitz is the perfect overprotective brother/stand-in father figure that his character is often at its best in, and his interactions with Lizzie (who Georgiana plays a role in setting him up with) are adorable. Frat boy Bingley was an unexpected icon who kind of stole the book. I really enjoyed seeing this version of the main Pride and Prejudice storyline play out from the sidelines; now I just wish that there was going to be a sequel focusing on that part of the story!

I think the biggest drawback of the story was the completely overblown backlash of the school towards Georgiana. I’ve been to a similar boarding school where there have been cases where extremely wealthy students don’t get kicked out for things that normal students would, and they never receive this amount of backlash. I have a really hard time believing that enough people were buying drugs from Wickham that they hate Georgiana for turning him in as well. The biggest issue is that she didn’t even do anything wrong. Sure, she must have been extremely naive to not realize her boyfriend was using her room to sell drugs, but she didn’t know, and she wasn’t even the one who turned her in. It’s an extremely frustrating experience to spend an entire book watching a character get hated on for essentially no reason.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed Accomplished. If you want to read a unique spin on a Pride and Prejudice retelling, then you should absolutely check it out. Despite the frustrating main conflict, where the entire school turns on Georgiana for very little reason, every other aspect of the story is absolutely wonderful and I wholeheartedly recommend it. I’m giving Accomplished 4/5 stars.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free eARC in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Accomplished comes out on July 26, 2022, so be sure to pick up a copy if you’re interested!

What’s your favorite classic book? Comment below!