The Romance Diaries: Stella

By Jenna Austen

What do you read if you're too young for Jane Austen, but you love great stories and sweet romance?Jane Austen's little sister!
Written in diary format, this is a completely fresh take on the themes in Jane Austen's classic Pride and Prejudice.From the outside, Stella has it all. She's inherited her mum's multi-million dollar empire, Fletcher Media, she gets to hang out on fashion shoots and lunch with celebrities rather than go to school, and she has an army of servants to cater to her every wish.When Alex Dudek, the son of Polish immigrants, starts as an intern at Fletcher Media, he immediately takes Stella for a spoilt rich airhead. And Stella thinks he's nothing more than a cold indie snob.But when they're forced to work together on a research project for Besties magazine, they can't help but get to know each other a little better... Could Alex have misjudged Stella? And will Stella let go of her pride long enough to admit she might have been wrong about Alex? A fabulously fun read for tweens!Ages: 9-12

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Aug 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781743097106

Jenna Austen

I’m Jenna Austen. Ever since I was little, I’ve loved reading and writing. Especially the kinds of stories that end with happily-ever-afters. And I adore a good romance - I’ve read EVERY Jane Austen novel ever written. I think the fact that I share the same surname with One of Greatest Writers To Have Ever Lived is pretty cool (thanks, Mum and Dad!). Actually, people sometimes ask me if I’m related to the famous Jane Austen… I’m not (I’ve checked!), but I don’t mind at all if you want to call me ‘Jane Austen’s Little Sister’ ;)

Book preview

Monday 14 May

10.30 am

TEEN MOGUL BORED TO DEATH IN EDITORIAL MEETING. Bleurgh. I should be so lucky.

The others are going on as usual about some little point whose thread I lost about an hour ago. I’m trying to look like I’m conscientiously taking notes, but instead I’m writing this. It’s the only way I can get through the boredom, my hand getting down what I’m really thinking while my face acts like a screen saver.

This is the umpteenth editorial meeting I’ve sat through. I know now Uncle Tim was right, and that it’s always going to be like this. That I just have to sit here and look like I’m listening and learning, and pretend to take notes. Occasionally, very occasionally, they ask my opinion on some new project, and then I’m expected to be SuperTeen, to ‘speak for my generation’. Teen Queen for Teen Media Empire, as one of the newspapers put it. Except I’m hardly a queen. More like the company pet or mascot — or a living logo. I don’t make the rules. I don’t set the agenda. I just go along with things and smile at the right moments.

The first day, I was so nervous. I gave myself a splitting pain in the skull trying to get my head around stuff. I stammered through a speech about continuing Mum’s, sorry, Mandy’s legacy. I kept hearing her saying, ‘Do me proud, Stella.’ And I didn’t want to let her down. Not when they were practically her last words.

I needn’t have worried, just like Uncle Tim had said. He told me that not much would be expected of me. Not till I was properly of age, that is, till I was eighteen, and even then … But I didn’t believe him. Fletcher Media had been Mandy, now it was me. Or at least it has been for about six months. Mandy’s will made that clear. From the day of my sixteenth birthday, I was to be involved. I was to have my own office. I was to go to meetings. I was to look at projects. Ah yes, said Uncle Tim, but I didn’t have to make the hard decisions. I had him and his team for that. An experienced team. A team who would take care of everything. All I had to do was turn up. Be an occasional sounding-board. Have my picture taken for Fletcher Media magazines. Make the odd appearance on Fletcher Media TV shows and on Fletcher Media blogs and websites and social media. No other media. Not at all. They’d manage my image, he said. The headlines that screamed Mummy’s Girl Youngest Company Director in the World and Is This the End of Fletcher Media? would soon dribble away if I did strictly as I was told, left everything to the experts and had no ‘unsuitable friends’ — which in practical terms meant I couldn’t have friends at all. Not that that was a big issue. Mandy had taken me out of school when I was eight because of threatening phone calls. I never went back. I was home-schooled by a long line of high-powered tutors, did really well, passed my leaving exams last year. I could do uni now if I wanted to. Not that I do want to. As for friends, well, I did make friends once or twice with the kids of staff members, but it never lasted. They moved on. And me, well, I stayed. On my own.

Jeez, what’s brought all this on? My hand’s really got carried away, penning one long whinge. ‘Don’t whinge, Stella,’ Mandy would have said. ‘Whingeing is for losers. And we’re not losers. We’re winners. Right?’

It’s so clear, her voice in my head. Suddenly I feel so lost without her, grief ambushing me when I least expected it. She wasn’t your usual kind of mum, not the sort you read about: she wasn’t cuddly or soft or even there a lot of the time. But she would have understood that I

Midday

Broke off earlier because morning tea came in. Can’t sit there scribbling while everyone’s busy gossiping over the coffee and cakes Maria or Lacey or whoever brings around. Today it was whoever. Someone I didn’t know but who the marketing manager, Jackson, told me was the new intern. Didn’t look like the sort we usually get. For a start, he isn’t a girl. Secondly, he doesn’t really have the feel of someone who’d want to work in Fletcher Media. He looks more like he belongs in some cool indie outfit — skating, music, film, something like that. Tall, dark hair, pale skin, faded jeans, street-art T-shirt. Turns out he’s a uni friend of Jackson’s daughter and she told him about the internship, knowing he was looking for one. Can’t have been his first choice, I bet. And bet he didn’t bank on being the tea-boy either.

I don’t think I’d want to be an intern here. Correction, I know I wouldn’t. I can’t imagine anything worse than having a career in Fletcher Media as your ambition. It’s different for me. I was born into it. I’m fated to be here. Those guys — well, they could do something else. Anything else. Like counting sheep on a remote island in Patagonia, for example.

That sounds bad. Like I’m ungrateful. Like I’m making fun of Mandy’s baby. ‘My second baby,’ she’d always say, if I was around to hear her. I knew actually it was her first. But that’s OK. Fletcher Media was there before me. I’m so proud of my mother and everything she achieved. She had to work really hard. She had to fight every step of the way to make her dream come true. There was no room in her life for regret. Even right at the end, she did not say, ‘I wish I had …’

Uncle Tim’s looking at me with that familiar little smile, which means he’s about to ask me to ‘contribute’. OK. Time to turn into SuperTeen.

Later

Uncle Tim was so eager that I didn’t have the heart to tell him or any of them that his new idea was lame as an old dog. And I could hardly say no. Not with Mandy’s voice fresh in my head. So I shrugged and said, ‘OK. I can have a go. If you want.’

Not exactly what you’d call mad enthusiasm but ‘Good, good,’ beamed Uncle Tim, and then they called the intern back in and we were properly introduced. His name’s Alex Dudek. At first I misheard his surname as ‘Dude’ and I made some kind of nervous crack about it, thinking it was a kind of nickname he’d adopted — I mean, it sort of went with his looks. That’s when he fixed me with this green stare and said, in a clipped sort of voice, ‘Actually, it’s a Polish name.’ I could see in his eyes what he thought: Ditzy little blonde, only here because of her genes. He’d seen the way the others were around me of course, patting me on the head and being ultra nice to me, but also patronising me and not really taking much notice of what I said (not that I said much, to be fair). Anyway, it stung me, coming from him, because he’s not all that much older than me and he’s just the intern, but I couldn’t say much except, ‘Oh, right, sorry.’ Then he said, ‘You weren’t to know,’ and if that was supposed to make me feel better, it fell miles short of its target because I just felt like an ignoramus who couldn’t be expected to know anything. Good start, right, considering we’re meant to work together on this ridiculous project!

Turns out we’re supposed to be researching ideas for a regular Besties feature on ‘What Makes Guys Tick’ — seen through a guy’s eyes but with a girl’s interests in mind. Yay, that clearly sounds like the ideal project for SuperTeen and Reluctant Sidekick. I mean, here we both are, a free mini focus group and unable to say no into the bargain. Plus this way we’ll be kept out of the hair of the real workers at Fletcher Media while we rack our pitiful brains trying to come up with something that makes ‘What Makes Guys Tick’ sound like the last word in fun rather than a naff sticker on a cheap made-in-China fake retro Mickey Mouse alarm clock.

And the Dude looks about as keen as me. He’s just left the room, with a face that says he’s revising his career plans right now, and wondering why on earth he said no to that excellent internship counting sheep in Patagonia. Oh my. The next few weeks are just going to be So Much Fun.

Tuesday 15 May

OK, so re-reading yesterday’s offering, I almost ripped out those pages, I sound so weak and whiny! The grief counsellor Uncle Tim made me go and see said it was normal to feel sorry for yourself when you have lost someone close to you, but I know what Mandy would have said about that. ‘Yep, it’s sad, sweetie, but you must move on. Life isn’t easy. Don’t expect it to be.’ When she was alive, I’d never have written the stuff I did yesterday. But if you’re going to keep an honest journal, one that really says what you’re thinking and feeling, then you should open up, tell the truth. Otherwise, what’s the point? It’s not like I’m trying to impress anyone. Nobody else is going to read this. Nobody even knows I’m doing it. And it’s going to stay that way, that’s for sure.

I never used to keep a journal before. I was kind of afraid that, if I did, Mandy might come across it, read it, and find out that I wasn’t really a winner after all but a loser like all the other people who’d let her down. Like my dad, for example. He left us before I was even born, when I was still just a wriggle and a heartbeat in her belly. I know his name but I’ve never met him. He’s never even tried to get in touch. When I was little, that used to bother me a bit sometimes, when other kids talked about their dads at school and I felt out of it. But once Mandy started having me home-schooled I never really thought about it. I don’t know why I’m even writing about him now. How did this start? Oh yeah, that’s right, keeping journals.

Anyway, Mandy, as well as being disappointed in what I wrote, would also have thought that keeping a journal was a dangerous indulgence. It wasn’t just her who might read it, after all. That’d be bad enough for an ordinary girl, but for someone in my position it could be dynamite. If you’re the only daughter and heir of Amanda Fletcher, deceased Media Mogul, then every shark would move in for the kill if my private thoughts somehow became public property. Goes without saying I’m not on Facebook or Twitter or any other social media. And if Uncle Tim knew I was keeping a journal, he’d freak. It’d be worse than the most unsuitable friends ever, the sort who go flapping their gums to the tabloids, as Mandy would’ve said. Because if something was in your own words, then you couldn’t dismiss it like you could dismiss a treacherous friend. So, yeah, I know keeping this journal isn’t maybe the smartest thing ever if it falls into the wrong hands. Not that it’s likely it will, anyway. But it has really helped me. And I can’t do without it now. I much, much prefer writing in this to talking to the counsellor. She annoyed me with her pat phrases about how there were ‘stages of grieving’ you go through, like it’s some kind of program you have to follow. Which makes it hard to tell her what you really feel. And Uncle Tim’s a good egg, he really is, but I can’t talk to him like I’m doing in this journal. Van and Pat, my live-in housekeepers, are great too, but ditto. As for other people — well, mostly they see what they want to see. Or what they can be bothered to see, that is.

Like the Dude. I’m sure he’s clocked me as a complete airhead. Today he came into my office — I still can’t write ‘my office’ without feeling all squirmy! — and handed me his iPad. Then he said, ‘Did a bit of research yesterday. Thought you might like to see it.’

It was a PowerPoint presentation showing what other teen mags are saying about what makes males tick. It looked pretty slick actually, though I tried not to let on how impressed I was.

‘It’s all about bros and boyfs,’ he said. I must have looked puzzled because he explained, ‘That’s short for brothers and boyfriends.’

‘Oh, I know that,’ I said. And I did know — I’d actually been gaping because I couldn’t believe he’d taken the project so seriously. Over the last few months I’ve been asked to dream up lots of things for other Fletcher Media mags and I hadn’t been riveted by any of it. And to be honest, I hadn’t given this particular task of ours a second thought, apart from thinking how uncomfortable it would be to work at close quarters with someone who clearly despised me.

‘My point is the focus,’ he went on smoothly. ‘Whenever they talk about guys in these mags, it’s in those terms. There’re pieces about who’s hot in music or film, and pieces about coping with break-ups and hook-ups and whatever. And there are occasionally personal stories about coping with annoying brothers or how to be friends with a boy without him trying to turn himself into your boyfriend. But it’s never from