Review of Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen and Caytee by Suzanna Kanto
I grabbed a Kindle copy of Caytee by Susanna Kanto (Caudex Books, 2022) recently because it was touted as a modern retelling of Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. As I’d wanted to read Northanger Abbey for a while, but often find Jane Austen’s writing style a little difficult to dig into, I thought this would be a great way to get the gist of the plot with more accessible language. But then I also checked out an annotated version of Northanger Abbey from the library, so I thought maybe I’d read them in parallel.
The downside of the annotated Northanger Abbey is that there was just too much there for my historian brain to get distracted by. So I loaded up my Kindle app and realized I already had the ebook of Northanger Abbey (along with everything else by Jane Austen). So then I really started reading the two books in parallel.
I did find Northanger Abbey a little difficult to parse, but I could get the gist of it for the most part. Caytee was fairly accessible but also extremely tongue in cheek, especially as a YA book that substituted Catherine Morland’s love of Gothic novels with Caytee Moore’s love of YA novels. So the authorial voice poked fun at YA trends, in the midst of a YA book. One could say that this is in keeping with Jane Austen making fun of Gothic novels in a Gothic novel, but Northanger Abbey really doesn’t have most of the hallmarks of a Gothic novel.
In the end, I wound up sticking solely with Northanger Abbey after reading the two books in parallel for about the first third. Then, once I’d finished that, I went back and finished Caytee. I felt like Caytee did a fairly good job of modernizing the story, but it was overly reliant on the original text, particularly the dialogue, in some chapters.
Of course, if you know the ending of Northanger Abbey, you might wonder how on earth that could work in a YA book, and the short answer is: it doesn’t. The one place where Caytee diverges sharply from Northanger Abbey is at the end, which was a bit of a surprise for a book that had followed the rest of the plot so faithfully. (Though in at least one spot, the book followed the plot of the 2007 Northanger Abbey movie rather than that of the book.)
So if you’re trying to make a decision between Northanger Abbey and Caytee, I’d recommend Northanger Abbey first, and then Caytee if you’re looking for a modern version of the same story.
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