Paperback, 238 pages
Published June 11th 2009 by Razorbill
Rating
Blurb
Fifteen-year-old Callie buys a pair of real Prada pumps to impress the cool crowd on a school trip to London. Goodbye, Callie the clumsy geek-girl, hello popularity! But before she knows what’s hit her, Callie wobbles, trips, conks her head...and wakes up in the year 1815!
She stumbles about until she meets the kind-hearted Emily, who takes Callie in, mistaking her for a long-lost friend. Sparks soon fly between Callie and Emily’s cousin, Alex, the maddeningly handsome - though totally arrogant - Duke of Harksbury. Too bad he seems to have something sinister up his ruffled sleeve...
From face-planting off velvet piano benches and hiding behind claw-foot couches to streaking through the estate halls wearing nothing but an itchy blanket, Callie’s curiosity about Alex creates all kinds of trouble.
But the grandfather clock is ticking on her 19th Century shenanigans. Can Callie save Emily from a dire engagement, win a kiss from Alex, and prove to herself that she’s more than just a loud-mouth klutz before her time there is up?
My thought
Callie wants to have a superb time during her London trip over the summer. In order for that to happen she feels that she must impress the popular girls of her school so that she can hang with them in London. Callie believes that the only way she can be a part of the popular group is to buy a pair of real prada heels. Buying the heels was the easy part the hard part was falling on the cobblestone streets of London and ending up in regency England. Not knowing what do to Callie pretends to be the long-lost friend of Emily and stays with her in Emily's cousin's masion, did I mention that Emily's cousin was a Duke!! Alex, the Duke, is cordial to Callie but something seems amiss. Callie thinks that Alex has fathered a child that he will not take care of, only to find out that the father to the child was Alex's deceased father. To put more drama into the book Callie helps Emily run away with her true love, only to find out that this could ruin Emily forever. Alex saves the day by making a marriage between the two lovers. At a ball to celebrate the upcoming marriage Alex and Callie dance the night away with one another, and that very night they kiss one another only for Callie to wake up the next morning and realize that she is back on the cobblestones of London and not on a countryside lawn, as she was the night before. Realizing that this event wasn't just a dream Callie decides that she dosen't need the popular girls after all. An unexpected twist happens when Callie is invited to go to a club with the popular girls and meets the owner of the club who looks exactly like Alex. Callie and the 21st century Alex dance the night away at the club and this is where the story ends.
This is a really good book. It gives you a look in on life in the past, and some cultures and such in England. This book closely resembles the book Pride and Prejudice (hence the Prejudice part of Prada & Prejudice).
The protagonist, Callie, is a very, very modern teenager. She’s certainly not “the popular girl” in high school or anything like that, but she behaved much like you’d expect a teenage girl to while in Europe for the first time. Although her roommates weren’t very kind to her and often left her by herself, she really wanted to go out and do what they did. She wanted to shop and go to dance clubs. There’s a lot of similarities, actually, between her and the way girls of the 18th century are portrayed as being.
But despite the similarities in the two time periods, there are certainly a lot of differences, and Mandy Hubbard did a great job of showing those. Callie is very vocal in her opinions throughout the book and it had an effect on the people she ran into in her time in the 18th century, because of the radical differences in the way people thought.
This book would be recommended for people who are into love stories and students who like books that have a lot of involvement in them and lots of details. I would rate this book three stars because I felt it almost dragged on to much. the author could have been shorter and got right to the point. Also because like there was a lot of characters and details that it got confusing remembering what was going on and who did what
