So, one day a tiny brunette walks into the library and stumbles around with her arms laden with books. Overflowing would perhaps be the best term for it. Her eyes are caught by a brightly colored book on a table by the library desk... because she's kind of like a ferret... in that she's attracted to shiny things anyway... and she sees that there's a book claiming to be a modern Pride & Prejudice sitting on the stand. Though she feels like a horrendous nerd, she rushes over and snatches up a copy because Jane Austen might just be one of her favorite authors ever. She starts the book while flying around the better part of the northeastern United States only to discover that she's basically picked up a porn novel. Yes, she's just read Snuff, but this is something else entirely. Snuff, for being about the porn industry, didn't go into nearly as many details as this waste of trees. Yeah, that's right... she said it. WASTE OF TREES.All right, so I guess my little picture of a day in the life of Kristi wasn't entirely necessary... or that interesting... but to say that I wasn't pleased to discover that the book I had invested several hours in turned out to be much less than I expected. The beginning showed promise. Had it not, I would have stopped reading it a lot sooner than when I finally considered that option. The premises... Darcy as a judge and Lizzy Bennett as a lawyer was an interesting way to modernize one of my favorite stories ever. Had the author actually continued on in that vein and run with the obvious tension that they felt, it would have been a better book for it. Instead, she resorted to about a hundred pages of sex. Seriously, once they made it to England on the vacation that neither were aware the other was going on all they did was hook up. The plot took a major hit at that point and the rest of the book was alternating between them continuously making each other miserable, pondering sex with the other, or finally actually accomplishing the act. I don't like romance novels... not in the modern sense where all they do is sleep together. That's my mother's territory, really. My romance novels are true Austen works... with plots and without the graphic sex scenes. I get enough of that in movies... I don't want them in my literature too.
The only benefit... in my mind anyway... was that I got to picture Colin Firth naked a lot. As far as I'm concerned, he IS Fitzwilliam Darcy... or Mark Darcy if we're Bridget Jones-ing it at the moment. He's pretty much my favorite British actor aside from Alan Rickman (for entirely different reasons) and I just love him to pieces. The BBC edition of P&P is the only one I bother with even if it is six hours long... mostly because he's in it. The only thing that might have made it better is if Emma Thompson had played Elizabeth... but I'm getting off the point now. This was not a good novel... plain and simple. The dialogue was too contrived and the descriptions were repetitious. Angelini really could have used other adjectives here and there instead of seeing the same one two sentences down on the page. I found myself replacing some words with others that just would have made more sense or flowed better. It read like fanfiction of an NC-17 variety.
I think that I'll probably avoid most modernizations of Austen's work from now on. This is the first one that I've bothered with and it was a complete disappointment. I do have a book that focuses on Darcy's point of view during the events of P&P which I'll read pretty soon (I think), but if that's as bad I don't think I'll be reading anything based on Austen's novels again. They're simply too fantastic for me to suffer through them being ruined by the poor writing of someone that's just looking to make a few dollars.
Rating: 1.5/5
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