TBR-ia: July 28, 2026
A Quick Intro
Bursting at the seams - my TBR (to be read) shelf has passed that and has entered “my cup runneth over” territory. “Why?” you may ask. Maybe you don’t have to ask because you are in the same sinking boat and have similar reasons. I see you, twin. We’re gonna need a bigger shelf.
So whyyyyyy is it that my shelf is like a busted can of biscuits? Let’s see:
Trips to thrift stores (which, I promise, have been less frequent over the last several years! The temptation is too strong.)
Too much easy access to the ThriftBooks app, with its temptation of free book rewards every time you reach a certain number of points, which I do too easily and too quickly
Having access to the internet, where an overwhelming number of people have an overwhelming amount of interesting book recommendations
A desire to have a collection to share with others and refer to in the future - you never know what you’ll need to know!
Addiction to stories and the smell of paper and ink
And then, boom! I become a crocheter, and there are so many options for creatively tracking your reading through yarn-based projects - blankets where each row corresponds to a book and granny squares where each has colors that match a book cover both seem to be popular options.
I have wanted to take on such a project, but just haven’t felt a burning desire to make a blanket yet (it’s coming, though, I can feel it).
Seemingly unrelated, I have really wanted a crochet wisteria garland for a while, and a few weeks ago I thought, “Why don’t I just combine the two? I could crochet wisteria flowers in colors corresponding to the covers of the books I read from my shelf. Then I will track my reading, motivate myself to read the books I have, and have my garland (albeit a probably odd one) by the end!”
Lo, here we are, but I don’t know what to call this little project - Weird Wisteria? The TBR-ia Project? (A combo of TBR and wisteria.) I’ve thought of it as the second option so far. Let me know if you have a better idea!
The First Wisteria Cluster
Wisteria made by following the YouTube tutorial by @onceuponacheerio
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcQWrxQh7bY&authuser=0
I still need to learn how to properly curl the wisteria as I crochet so the end result looks fuller. Having fewer color changes might have helped.
The Book
For Darkness Shows the Stars by Diana Peterfreund
Shortest summary: Jane Austen’s Persuasion, but in the future!
For some reason the title including the word “stars” and the idea of it being in the future combined in my mind so that I went into this book thinking it was Persuasion in space.
My friends, it is not, in fact, set in space. I was slightly disappointed about that, but otherwise quite enjoyed this book!
If you enjoy Jane Austen spinoffs and light sci-fi settings (definitely not heavy on the science aspect in this one), then I think you’d enjoy this. With The Other Bennet Sister being such a popular show recently, I wonder if books like this will also ride that wave of hype.
The character names (of main characters most notably) from the get-go make very clear the parallels between this book and the original Persuasion. Example: Anne Elliot in this book is Elliot North.
The story is set at a point in the future after mankind played around with human genetic manipulation and those descended from the people who underwent such procedures were all born with reduced intellectual capacity, to the point of barely being able to speak. The only people whose children were not affected were the Luddites, who refused to participate in the genetic modifications. After a few generations, this created a society where descendants of the Luddites are the ruling class and run estates somewhat reminiscent of what we might see in Jane Austen-esque period pieces. These estates are largely employed by the descendants of everyone else, called the Reduced, and the Luddites see it as their duty to care for and direct these people.
Elliot North is a member of one such Luddite family, and she grows up in a time where society is changing because a new generation has risen up after the Reduced, a generation in which some children are being born without the previously expected intellectual differences, as if human genetics are slowly reverting back to what they were before the genetic experiments. As a child, Elliot becomes friends with a boy who works on their estate and who is the second generation in his family of people with “typical” intelligence born from the Reduced.
That boy’s name is Kai, which he later changes to Malakai Wentforth. (Bet you can’t guess who that is meant to be, haha.)
Because of the setting differences in For Darkness Shows the Stars, I was challenged to consider concepts that the original Persuasion did not bring up, such as:
moral/ethical and practical implications of manipulating human DNA
the complex relationships created by the estate environment (“masters” and “servants”)
the ways that individuals and society think about and treat differences in people (in this case, intellectual differences)
Overall
I enjoyed For Darkness Shows the Stars - most of the time, the main characters seemed to stay true to the way the original characters behaved (with the exception of Wentforth/Wentworth - to me, he seemed somewhat harsher in this retelling) and, though the plot stuck pretty closely to the way Persuasion unfolded, the sci-fi aspects added enough newness that I found it engaging.
Oh, sidenote, it was not what I would call spicy or sexually explicit - I try to avoid that in books, so thankfully this one fit the bill by sticking pretty close to Persuasion in that way, as well!
If you have read this book, did you think Wentforth was crueler to Elliot than Wentworth was to Anne?
Are there any other Jane Austen spinoffs you would recommend to me? (At the risk of making my TBR shelf spill over even more!)
Let me know!
Wishing you goodness without end,
Jess