Edmondson’s charming debut transports Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility to contemporary Washington, D.C., where a senator’s death leads to scandal. Sen. Gregory Richardson leaves behind his widow and their two daughters, Daisy and Wallis. On the day of the memorial service, with the ink still wet on a story about Gregory’s affair, Daisy, the older daughter, who’s followed her father into politics, fields a call from a reporter with questions about mismanaged campaign funds. She hopes to keep the scandal from further sullying their name as she mourns her father whom she loved despite his faults. Then journalist Atlas Braidy-Lowes (Daisy’s best friend who she has been “trying to fall out love with” for 15 years) returns from England to write a feature on Senator Richardson, and Wallis falls for Blake Darley, a South Carolina politician from the other side of the aisle. As Atlas uncovers the widening scope of the senator’s crimes, the novel finds Austen’s themes alive and well in contemporary society, where women must choose between nice or powerful men and are left without options if a man behaves badly while they try to balance their hearts, careers, and reputations in search of happiness. This retelling is a witty success.