Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo, Scribd, 24 Symbols, Mondadori, and Angus & Robertson
Concerto*
Not a Good P&P Variation
I am a big Pride and Prejudice fanfiction fan. There was a certain point when I was in nursing school where it was just about the only thing I read that wasn’t a textbook. So I have pretty exacting standards of what I like and don’t like about modern variations. I enjoy many types of variations, including those that take place far after the original timeframe of the story, so I was intrigued by this book’s premise of them meeting 10 years after the original. Unfortunately, the premise was the best part of the book. It failed for me on several fronts. Neither Elizabeth nor Darcy seemed to be the characters we know and love from the original; they could be anybody. Elizabeth is far too independent-minded for a woman of those times, even if she did have to “work” for a living playing piano for the Beau Monde, and Darcy was more dour and dark than he typically is–actually being threatening and aggressive. Both Elizabeth and Darcy seem to have wild emotional shifts that don’t make sense for either the characters in this book or for the originals. I don’t mind sensual variations of Pride and Prejudice; some that I have read have been quite good. But this book didn’t make the right transition into the sensual part of the book. I didn’t get how it made sense for the characters at that point in the story, and the tipping point for Elizabeth was actually bizarre.
As another oddity, the first line of the blurb at Amazon is misleading; Elizabeth doesn’t refuse him. Rather, she wants time to think about it.
The language of the book was an odd mixture of a poor attempt at the heightened language that is required for a good historical novel and too modernistic speech. Most of the lines of dialogue I can’t imagine someone saying. I think the cover is wrong, too. This book is supposed to take place ten years after the original Pride and Prejudice. So, Darcy would be 38, and Elizabeth would be 30; the cover models look like they’re both in their twenties. If you enjoy Pride and Prejudice variations, you might do better looking elsewhere.
