Thank you to Beau North and Netgalley for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I didn't know how much I needed this book until I was already into it, and I would easily recommend it to anyone who loves a good historical fiction novel I do highly recommend reading Longbourn's Songbird before reading this book. It isn't a direct sequel, more of a companion novel. Still, you should probably get Lizzie and Darcy's side of the story before crying over Richard's part, yes? And because I am going to try really hard not to spoil the first book, but it IS a bit difficult to gush and not.

The Colonel  
by Beau North 
Published Date : July 9, 2019
Read Date: June 2019
Format : e-galley
Genre : historical fiction
Page Count : 405 pages
Rating :  5/5 Moose

Synopsis 
How well do you really know your parents? (Not) Dealing with PTSD, Ben Fitzwilliam packs up his life and moves back to his dad's home in Annapolis, Maryland. Ben starts to find peace and purpose as he dives into the letters his father left behind, exploring the possibility of writing a book about his life. As he meets and falls in love with Keisha, he explores the heartaches and PTSD of his father, Richard Fitzwilliam's life.

Characters  
Bennet Fitzwilliam - a Pulitzer prize winning journalist and only son of Richard Fitzwilliam. He's dealing with PTSD after 9/11.

Keisha Barnes - Annapolis PD officer who agrees to help Ben explore his father's life through letter.

Richard Fitzwilliam - William Darcy's cousin. Fought in both WWII and the Korean War. The younger son and a bit of a playboy, always charming. Fiercely loyal to his family.

Rants, Raves, and Reviews 
I rarely read books that are considered sequels to Austen novels, especially Pride and Prejudice. This is primarily because the story seems done, but mainly because every sequel I have read tones down Lizzie and Darcy's personalities. Even knowing this, I was incredibly excited for this companion novel. Longbourn's Songbird is one of my favorite P&P retellings because it captures the spirit of the original novel while also updating it and adding readable twists. My favorite thing to say about the novel is that for the first time I would have been okay with Lizzie not ending up with Darcy. So I had big expectations for this novel.

This book is told in dual timelines, though it is primarily about Richard. Ben's life is, in some ways, a quick and easy portion of the book, coming in at intervals when Richard's world is almost too much. Or well, at least at the part where I was about to cry on the subway. In some ways, if there has to be a weakest part of the book, it's Ben's story line. It serves a purpose to show that the family lines still continue and still are more or less dysfunctional. And to show how the last of the Fitzwilliam is doing, something that is a repeated point through out the book. Richard wants to leave his dad as the last Fitzwilliam, then Richard accepts his position as the last Fitzwilliam, and then when he has Ben, his legacy lives on.

Okay, that makes it sound short and sweet (and maybe a bit spoilery) but it does sum up the book: understanding and embracing what Fitzwilliam means.

And as with most women in the book, I am just beyond smitten with Richard. He's charming and brilliant, with that ridiculous air of vagrancy that really rich people can make seem so appealing. I knew some of his story from the first book -- his brother and father's death, fighting in World War II...basically most of the 1940s are a deeper dive from the first book. And yet it never feels like a rehash; I never felt like I was trying to skip ahead to the next part. In fact, it's even more painful, because I love Richard even more by the time we hit his and Slim's story. And I was so scared to see the aftermath of its fall out. We are told this book isn't a love story. We know from the beginning that Richard died unmarried, that Ben was a product not necessarily out of love in the traditional sense. And yet I still held on hope for Richard to get....something.

This book also focuses on all the characters we love from the first book. How are Jane and Charles? Charlotte, Anne, Lizzie and Darcy? Does Georgina find her stride, her own place in the world? All these characters are there in some capacity. Richard lives in New York with Anne and Charlotte before going off to Korea, and then recovers there after. Anne and Charlotte help him recover mentally and physically. I love their trio. Who is really helping and depending on whom? It rotates as the book goes on. I honestly don't know how I feel about Anne by the end of the book, (begrudgingly like her, maybe? Find her pompous and spoiled definitely) but I am love Charlotte. I won't go too much into her as to avoid spoiling the first book, but if there is a third person whose story needed to be told, it is hers.

He can't hurt me now, not that I know my own worth.

And Georgina! I never have cared for how a sequel has treated Georgina. She always comes across as meek and timid, ruined by what Wickham did. Someone who needs Darcy to keep her from falling. Not this Georgina, which is a huge relief. We find out she's married from Ben, but I didn't actually expect to find out about how she met her husband.

Your sister isn't sad, you cabbage. She's in love.

Even knowing this book was about war and lost loves, I didn't expect to shed as many tears as I did. And yet this book didn't steer me away from love, or feel like it wasn't still hopeful in the end. Lost time, lost love...these are usually anxiety triggers for me, things that send me into a bit of a spiral. But surprisingly, this book didn't do that. Richard's life isn't worthless or incomplete, even if he never marries. And that? That is why I love this book.

Final Thoughts 
I've recently been toying with the idea that I want my relationship status to be "fell in love with my soulmate a decade ago. It didn't work out, and I'm happy being alone." Of course, this would require me to admit that I believe in soulmates, which I don't. Either way, this book was a perfect read for someone feeling that way. This book has so much heartache. But it also had so much good in it too. It's not really a romance but is still a book about relationships. About regrets. About learning to live with it all. About learning to let it all go. And the added bonus of loving P&P characters doesn't help.

Now to try really hard to not read Longbourn's Songbird again RIGHT NOW because I have way too many new books to read. 

Content Warnings for war, PTSD, 9/11 discussion, mentions of both physical and mentally abusive relationships
***
Listen, I did just close my office door to finish the last few pages and I have ZERO REGRETS about doing so. 

This is the perfect follow up for Longbourne’s Songbird. It tells the story I was dying to know from the first book and then stories regarding Richard that I didn’t even know I needed. I laughed, cried, and fell completely in love with this complicated character. Beau North knows exactly how to draw the reader in and make them feel everything the characters are feeling , in the best way possible!

I can’t wait for this to be ready to publish. I have had the privilege to read excerpts of this along the way and now am honored to finally be a part of her project, and I can tell you this: THIS is Beau’s finest work yet! She had me in tears a number of times, happy tears too, and the dialogue is smart and well-intended, so honest. The scenes with Elizabeth and Darcy are electric and when Richard is with them…you can feel the dangerous, loving undercurrent that just “is” between the three. But this masterpiece, and I can honestly and confidently call this a masterpiece, is so much more than a romance or fan fiction. Readers bemoan they want something new while still being familiar, that they want something more. This definitely answers that call. Be prepared to have your socks blown off by this sweeping novel.
“Think: if Jane Austen and William Martin collaborated, this novel might be their love child.” 

In The Colonel, Beau North weaves a tale of love and war, pain and forgiveness through the lives of Richard Fitzwilliam and his son, Ben. Alternating between post-WWII and post-9/11 America, the novel immerses us in the experiences of both father and son as they wrestle with the aftermath of war. We are also treated to the perspectives of the many people who love Richard, including Elizabeth and Will Darcy. (The Colonel is a sequel to North's fabulous Longbourn's Songbird, but could be read as a stand-alone novel, too.) Ultimately, The Colonel is a love story in the grandest sense, celebrating the many kinds of love that give meaning and purpose to existence. I highly recommend this book!

I am sitting here with tears just on the edge of falling. I am blown away by this saga. So many emotions...lives with such depth...intertwined and also sometimes set apart and kept secret.

While you can read this as a "stand-alone" novel I do hope you will treat yourself and read Longbourn's Songbird before reading this. I reread that myself before reading this. - Sheila Majczan

Having read Longbourn's Songbird and knowing this book was coming out, I assumed it would be a sequel. It's not. It CAN be read as a companion piece to the previous book (which I highly recommend that you do), but I think it would be just as effective if read as a stand-alone novel. Longbourn's Songbird was Elizabeth Bennet, whose story revolves around the romance between her and Will Darcy and is a wonderfully creative variation of Pride and Prejudiceset primarily in the 1940s. 

The Colonel is Richard Fitzwilliam, Will Darcy's cousin. His story spans several decades and two wars (WWII and Korea), and it requires understanding the histories of multiple fictitious families - the Fitzwilliams, the Darcys, the deBourghs, the Bennets, the Collinses, the Lucases, and the Prenskas - so this turns into quite the saga. In addition, it's "authored" by Ben Fitzwilliam, Richard's son, who is a writer suffering PTSD both from witnessing the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and then writing follow-up newspaper columns about what the attack survivors experienced that terrible day. Ms. North brilliantly meshes all these diverse storylines to paint a vivid picture of Ben's complex father and the lives and loves that affected his.

Ben, age 47, is at a crossroads in 2002 as the book begins, having just quit his job, lost his longstanding girlfriend (a stale relationship he doesn't mourn), and moved out of his New York City apartment. He heads to the long-deserted Fitzwilliam estate in Annapolis, Maryland that's filled with his childhood memories. There he discovers a treasure-trove of old letters that his father saved, including some that the old man had written but never mailed to "Slim," a woman he'd obviously loved. 

This sends Ben down the research rabbit hole, interviewing those family members still living who might shed more light on the letters' contents. When he contacts his cousin Maggie Darcy, he learns the poorly-kept family secret that his father was in love with her mother. Maggie also is able to provide letters from Richard to her parents, which help fill in the blanks of his life story.

Richard is neither a saint nor a sinner, but fate is not kind to him. He handles life as well as he can under his circumstances, coming close to committing suicide after surviving World War II but finally finding some purpose and peace in his later years despite his many disappointments and heartaches. The ending, which is bittersweet rather than hearts and flowers, may be disappointing to some readers, but it matches the realistic tone of this remarkable novel. 

Those familiar with Longbourn's Songbird will notice that some scenes are repeated here. Re-reading them in this context is necessary to Richard's story. 

The book wrings every emotion from its reader - it's heartbreaking and heartwarming and everything in between. It's also a brilliantly inventive biography that is beautifully written. Ms. North covers serious topics including PTSD, domestic violence, homosexuality, same-sex parenting, and homeless veterans, and she does so in a matter-of-fact manner that never sounds preachy. 

There is adult content, as Richard has a number of sexual partners over the years (including Ben's mother), and Ben himself begins a new sexual relationship after moving to Annapolis. 

I received an ARC of this book with no promise of a favorable review.

Evocative and brilliant, The Colonel takes the reader down a bittersweet path of a charismatic, yet flawed man's life. I was captivated for the first time by this author's writing when reading Longbourn's Songbird. It was a love story at its heart, but was also the saga of family and friends set against the modern historical time of the American South of the late 1940's. I was ecstatic to learn that one of the most colorful and emotion-generating characters of that story was being given the spotlight in the follow-up companion novel, The Colonel.

As I indicated, The Colonel is a companion novel. While not exactly a sequel, The Colonel wraps around and weaves through the events in the early story, Longbourn's Songbird. It works best read after that one to get the full effect of several of the more pivotal scenes and experiences.

The Colonel is two stories, really. There is a contemporary thread about Ben Fitzwilliam. He's an award-winning journalist now in his fifties who struggles with PTSD and grief from 9/11 and finds himself ready to take the fork in the road that leads him out of NYC and his career to the quiet Annapolis home that was his father's where he not only discovers a new chance at love, but also an opportunity to fill in the large gaps that he knows of his dad's life through newly discovered letters and reunions with his cousins.

Ben's story wraps around his father's full, tumultuous life beginning from the time Richard went away to fight in WWII to his mid-life years. Picking himself up many times over with a life story that can't be told in isolation because of all the lives tied in with Richard's, Richard displayed a man who made mistakes and owned them, but also a privately courageous man who was shaped by tragic circumstances and the times. Ben discovers who his father truly was and in so doing finds healing for himself and a new chance at love as well.

This book is heartwrenching and will brutalize a reader's emotions. It's not an easy reading experience, but it ends up owning a reader until the end. I was glad to get Ben's chapters sprinkled throughout to give me moments to recruit myself because of the emotional impact of Richard's story. 
It was deeply moving as Richard became known to me as more than the larger than life side character in Longbourn's Songbird. He was an amazing character and I was glad to get to know him through his own eyes and through the eyes of those nearest and dearest to him. They all knew him well and yet no one knew him completely like the reader is allowed to know him. 
I just wanted the best for him and agonized as he sought for ways to get past his grief of losing James, the darkness that the war left in him, finding and losing true love and then looking for its replacement and knowing he would never find it, trying to be part of his family and yet tugged to keep looking for peace and contentment since love was even more elusive. It's a heavy hitter and has stayed with my still. 

Richard's story was brilliantly written and I was left both fully satisfied and all hollowed out with tears running down my cheeks. It occurred to me just how important Ben's framing story was after I was through reading. Ben got to have what I wanted desperately for Richard and I could console myself with that thought. Lots of superlatives come to mind when I think of this book and I have the strongest desire to gush, but at the same time, I feel like a mourner who wants to show utmost respect through silent contemplation.

Incidentally, while I've mostly raved about the superb characters and storyline, I really shouldn't neglect mentioning the attention to historical setting of the forties and fifties that was present and colored in the scenes so masterfully.

I feel a little guilty wanting so many people to read this one knowing just how much it will gut its readers, but, yes, those who enjoy historical romance and fiction of the WWII and post-war eras, family sagas, and the more tragedy torturing their heroes the better, should snatch this up along with a goodly pile of tissue.

Emotional and evocative, The Colonel explores how an unresolved past will continue bearing on one’s future until it’s finally dealt with. Beau North’s gorgeous writing is unflinchingly honest in peeling back the messy, complicated family dynamics that run through the story, and she will make you feel exactly what the characters are feeling—all the joy, pain, jealousy, confusion, and love that define their lives.