Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh Review: Is It Worth Reading?

Verdict: A warm, funny sapphic time travel rom-com that drops a stuck Pittsburgh teen into 1812 and lets her fall for the girl who finds her, held back by a title that promises more Austen than it delivers and a back half that rushes.

Best for: Readers who want a sweet, closed-door YA love story with Regency gowns, culture-clash comedy and a happy ending, and who don’t need the time travel to come with rules.

Heat level: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5: young adult, closed door, kisses only)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.8/5: a 3.94 Goodreads average across more than 12,000 ratings, with two starred trade reviews and a steady complaint that it isn’t really Pride and Prejudice)

Tropes: Time travel, fish out of water, Regency setting, dual POV, slow burn, forbidden love, arranged marriage, decoy suitors, queer awakening, first love.

Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh by Rachael Lippincott is a standalone young adult novel from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers (published in the UK as Pride and Prejudice and the City), a time travel romance that sends Audrey Cameron, an 18-year-old artist who’s lost her spark in 2023 Pittsburgh, back to 1812 England and onto the estate of Lucy Sinclair, an heiress whose father wants her married off to a man she can’t stand.

It sits at a 3.94 average across roughly 12,300 Goodreads ratings, picked up starred reviews from Booklist and Shelf Awareness, and its audiobook made YALSA’s Amazing Audiobooks for Young Adults list. The ratings are steadier than most: 70% of readers give it four or five stars and only about 5% go below three. The arguments are mostly about what the title promised, and that’s worth sorting out before you start.

What Is Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh About?

This is a YA historical sapphic romance with a fantasy engine, and the time travel is the whole setup rather than a puzzle to solve. A Regency setting means the usual machinery is all here: balls, chaperones, suitors, and a heroine whose future gets decided by her father. The twist is that the girl stuck inside it is a modern teen who has no idea how a corset works and no patience for any of it.

Audrey arrives missing things: her creative drive, a spot at art school (she’s been waitlisted), and her boyfriend, after a recent breakup. Lucy has the opposite problem. She knows exactly what she wants, which is music, and exactly what’s expected of her, which is a husband. The book runs on alternating first-person chapters, so you get the culture shock from Audrey’s side and the quiet panic of falling for a girl who might vanish from Lucy’s.

What Makes This Sapphic Time Travel Romance Work

The culture clash: Readers keep naming the comedy of Audrey meeting Regency life head on, from the underwear to the etiquette. Autostraddle and several blog reviewers single it out as the most fun part of the book.
Lucy: She’s the character trade and blog reviewers praise most. Autostraddle says Lippincott “nails the spirit of an Austen heroine” with her, and she gets the stronger arc.
A sweet, low-angst romance: “Sweet” and “cute” are the recurring words. In a sample of 30 Goodreads reviews I read, 12 praised the romance in those terms, including some who rated the book low.
A slow burn that stays kind: The two leads become friends first, and one blogger points out that the 1812 setting doesn’t bury the queer storyline in tragedy. Lucy worries about society, not about whether her feelings are wrong.
The audiobook: Natalie Naudus and Shakira Shute split the two voices, and listeners praise it often enough that it’s a real reason to pick the audio.

Book Synopsis

Audrey Cameron’s senior year is falling apart. She and her boyfriend just broke up, the art school she’s counting on has her on the waitlist, and she hasn’t been able to draw anything worth keeping in months. Her days are spent at her family’s convenience store in Pittsburgh, where one of the regulars is Mr. Montgomery, an eccentric old grump who claims he can help her get her spark back.

Then he hands her a quarter, and the next thing she knows she’s waking up in England in 1812, on the grounds of an estate called Radcliffe. The girl who finds her is Lucy Sinclair, who has troubles of her own. Lucy’s mother is long gone, her father is set on marrying her to a man she can’t bear, and her dream of studying music doesn’t fit anyone’s plans for her. Audrey’s sudden arrival, in clothes nobody has seen before and with a vocabulary to match, is the least Regency thing that has ever happened at Radcliffe.

Audrey becomes convinced she can only get home by winning over a suitor, so Lucy takes on the job of teaching her how a young lady of 1812 is supposed to behave. That means lessons in etiquette, manners and how to get through a social evening without saying anything alarming. It also means a lot of time together, and both of them start noticing feelings neither one expected. Audrey has a deadline she doesn’t fully understand. Lucy has a wedding she doesn’t want. And the one thing neither of them can work out is what happens to the other if Audrey does find her way back.

My Review

The premise is a delight, and I’ll start there because it’s the reason most people pick this up. A Gen Z girl stranded in a Regency drawing room is pure comedy fuel, and Lippincott uses it well. Audrey’s reactions to the clothes, the manners and the rules land, and they never tip into mocking the past. It’s the same fish-out-of-water pleasure as a good Bridgerton episode, aimed squarely at teen readers.

Lucy is the other big reason it works. She’s trapped, smart and quietly funny, and her chapters carry the emotional weight of the book. The romance between the two girls grows out of a real friendship, and I liked that the book lets them be kind to each other. When it gets tender, it’s because they’ve earned it over a lot of shared scenes.

Where it struggles is pace and depth, and those are the complaints that come up most once you get past the title. A few Goodreads reviewers say the back half feels rushed, and School Library Journal notes the plot moves slowly before that. So it’s slow in the middle and quick at the end. Kirkus says the time travel “could have been better fleshed out” and that the two first-person narrators can be hard to tell apart. Some readers find the prose plain, and at least one wanted more yearning and tension from the romance. A Lesbrary reviewer calls the villains, Lucy’s father and her intended, one-note. None of these sink the book. They do keep it from being more than a very pleasant read.

One expectation to reset: this is not a Pride and Prejudice retelling. There’s no Darcy, no Bennet sisters and no Austen plot. The title points at the era and the mood, and readers who came for an Austen remix keep saying they felt misled. It’s also not set in Pittsburgh for long, since most of the book happens at Radcliffe. If Austen is what drew you, recalibrate and think “Regency rom-com.” If you were worried you’d need to know the original, relax. You don’t.

My honest note: A charming, kind and very readable time travel romance that’s lighter on Austen and on time travel logic than the cover suggests. If you want sweet over swoony and comfort over complexity, it’s a lovely afternoon. If you need the rules of the magic or a real retelling, look elsewhere.

Element	In Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh
Central relationship	Audrey Cameron and Lucy Sinclair: a stuck 2023 art student and a trapped 1812 heiress, friends to lovers
Core tropes	Time travel, fish out of water, Regency setting, dual POV, slow burn, arranged marriage, decoy suitors
Setting	Pittsburgh in 2023 and Radcliffe, an English country estate, in 1812
Heat level	1/5: young adult, closed door, kisses only
Series	Standalone with a happy ending; the time travel story is complete in one book
Content notes	Death of a parent (in the past), pressure into an unwanted marriage to an older man, homophobic attitudes of the period, alcohol, references to past child abuse and gaslighting

How Spicy Is Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh?

A 1/5. This is a young adult novel, listed by the publisher for ages 14 and up and by Kirkus for ages 14 to 18, and it stays closed door the whole way. Readers describe kissing and longing, and one Goodreads reviewer points out that Lucy has never been kissed before Audrey turns up. That tells you the register. I haven’t used romance.io here, because the book is catalogued as YA rather than adult romance, so the number comes from the age range and from what readers report on the page.

The thing worth flagging in advance isn’t heat at all. It’s the pressure on Lucy to marry a man she doesn’t want, who two readers describe as much older, and the period attitudes toward two girls together. Neither is graphic, and no reviewer I found flags anything darker than that. If you want the same low-heat register elsewhere, She Gets the Girl, Lippincott’s co-written college romance, sits at 1/5 too, and our closed-door lesbian romance list has plenty more.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you love Regency settings but want a modern narrator to laugh at them, you prefer sweet and low-angst over high drama, you’re happy with closed-door YA, and you like a love story that starts as a friendship.

You may want to skip it if: you were hoping for an actual Pride and Prejudice retelling, you need time travel with clear rules, you want slow-burn tension that hurts, or plain prose and a quick ending tend to annoy you.

In short: a cozy, funny Regency time-slip romance that trades depth for charm, and mostly gets away with it.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

This is a traditionally published YA book with a big-name author behind it, and its discovery story looks like one. Lippincott co-wrote the bestseller Five Feet Apart and the popular sapphic YA romance She Gets the Girl, and this book arrived in August 2023 with full trade coverage: starred reviews from Booklist and Shelf Awareness, plus positive reviews from Kirkus and School Library Journal. Sapphic outlets covered it too, including Autostraddle and two separate reviews on the Lesbrary. It has since come out in paperback (September 2024), gone to UK readers as Pride and Prejudice and the City, and been translated into Spanish and Portuguese. What I didn’t find is a Reddit footprint. No discussion threads surfaced in my searches, which fits a book that sells through libraries, school lists and the author’s existing YA audience rather than through online buzz.

The audiobook is a real part of its reach. Simon & Schuster Audio released it the same day as the hardcover, with Natalie Naudus and Shakira Shute narrating across 8 hours and 12 minutes, and it landed on YALSA’s Amazing Audiobooks for Young Adults list. Listeners on Goodreads praise the narration by name.

Prefer audio? Listen to Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh on Libro.fm, the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The sweetness, first and most often. “Cute” and “sweet” are the recurring words, and they show up even in two-star reviews. Then the leads, especially Lucy, whom Autostraddle and several bloggers single out. The culture-clash humor gets steady credit, and so does the tone: Lesbrary’s Maggie calls it a light romp, and one blogger likes that the queer romance isn’t crushed by period tragedy. Kirkus and Booklist both praise the supporting cast, and one reviewer liked that the feared love triangle with the male suitors never happens. Notably, one Goodreads reader enjoyed a strong sense of 1812 class rules, which runs against the complaint that the history is thin.

What readers argue about and complain about: The title, above everything. In the 30 Goodreads reviews I read, five said it isn’t a Pride and Prejudice retelling, and two blog reviewers made the same point, one adding that the book barely spends time in Pittsburgh either. Second: pacing. Three of those reviewers called it rushed, mostly in the second half, and School Library Journal found the plot slow, so the complaint is uneven pace rather than just speed. Third: the romance itself splits readers. Most call it a satisfying slow burn, while at least one found it short on tension and yearning. Beyond that, two reviewers felt there were too many male love interests for a sapphic book, a couple found the prose plain, and Kirkus wanted more from the time travel. One Goodreads reader questioned how calmly Audrey accepts being thrown 200 years back, and one stopped at 40% because the writing felt juvenile to her. Kirkus and SLJ both note that the two leads are white, while Lucy has a Black cousin in the supporting cast.

The standalone question worth asking first: it’s complete. The book resolves its time travel story and ends happily for Audrey and Lucy, and there’s no sequel to wait for. If you want more Lippincott next, She Gets the Girl (co-written with Alyson Derrick) is her most-read sapphic book at 4.07 on Goodreads across about 78,000 ratings, a touch higher than this one. The Lucky List, her earlier solo novel, sits at 4.03.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh a Pride and Prejudice retelling?

No. It borrows the Regency era and the Austen mood, but there’s no Darcy, no Bennets and no Austen plot. It’s the most common complaint in reader reviews, so go in expecting a Regency time travel rom-com rather than a retelling.

How does the time travel work in Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh?

Loosely. Mr. Montgomery, a grumpy regular at Audrey’s family store, gives her a quarter, and she wakes up in 1812 England. The book never builds a full set of rules, and Kirkus says the time travel could have been better fleshed out.

Does Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh have a happy ending?

Yes. Audrey and Lucy get a happily ever after, and reviewers at the Lesbrary and Bookcats Library both confirm it. At least one reader wanted a longer epilogue to explain the practical side of how it all works out.

How spicy is Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh?

A 1/5. It’s young adult and closed door, with kissing and longing but nothing more on the page. The publisher lists it for ages 14 and up.

Is Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh the same book as Pride and Prejudice and the City?

Yes. Simon & Schuster published it in the UK as Pride and Prejudice and the City in August 2023. The story is the same, so don’t buy both.

Is there an audiobook of Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh?

Yes. Natalie Naudus and Shakira Shute narrate the unabridged Simon & Schuster Audio edition, which runs 8 hours and 12 minutes. It was named to YALSA’s Amazing Audiobooks for Young Adults list.

If You Loved Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh, Read These Next

If the displaced-in-time romance is what got you, One Last Stop is the comparison Autostraddle reached for: a girl stuck out of her own decade, a modern love interest, and a lot more heat at 3/5. If it was the Austen world, The Miseducation of Caroline Bingley is an actual Pride and Prejudice spin-off, sapphic and still gentle on heat. And if you want time travel taken far more seriously, This Is How You Lose the Time War is all longing and no spice, with time itself as the battlefield.

For more like this, browse our lesbian YA books guide, the sapphic Regency romance list, or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh wants to be a fun, kind queer twist on the Regency romance, and it mostly is. The culture-clash comedy works, Lucy is a lovely Austen-style heroine, and the friends-to-lovers romance is sweet in a way readers keep thanking it for. It’s also not the Austen retelling its title suggests, the time travel runs on vibes, and the last stretch rushes to its happy ending. If you want a cozy, closed-door YA romance with gowns and a modern narrator, it’s well worth it. If you want rules, retelling or real angst, it won’t scratch that itch. Check Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh on Amazon

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh ranks as a charming traditionally published sapphic YA time travel rom-com. It’s warm, funny and kind, held back by a misleading title and thin time travel logic. It’s best read for Lucy and the culture clash rather than for Austen.