September 16, 2016.
Three Stars
When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Darcy’s marriage
proposal, he goes to bed feeling devastated, with a plan to leave for London
the following day to hide from his disgrace. However, unlike in Jane Austen’s
original Pride and Prejudice, Darcy
doesn’t wake up the next morning and carry on with his life, eventually clearing
up the misunderstandings between himself and Elizabeth. Instead, he awakens to
hear the maid singing the same song as they day before, and he soon realizes
that he is reliving the previous day over again.
At first, Darcy is pleased because it is as if his
proposal to Elizabeth never happened, so he can carry on without the embarrassment.
He treats the day as a reprieve, and goes to bed happy – but when he wakes up,
it is once again the same day. As the pattern repeats over many days, with the
maid singing her song each morning, Darcy experiences the gamut of emotions,
including a descent into madness and carelessness with his own life. He feels
he is living a waking nightmare that he can never escape.
It is not until Darcy begins to think less of himself
and more of fixing the problems he has created that he finds he may have hit on
a solution to his recurring day. Selfish Darcy finally decides to take the initiative
to make better choices and change for the better in his treatment of others,
especially Elizabeth and the Bennet family, and he has infinite second chances
to be the best man he can be.
The nuances of language and character are perfectly
fitted to Austen’s original novel. This is good, solid fan fiction, but I don’t
think it would succeed on its own. It relies too much on the original Pride and Prejudice source material to
enforce the romantic aspects of Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship – if you
haven’t read the original, it is unlikely that you will recognize any spark of
romance between the two of them here. This novel has very high ratings because
it is so easy to transfer the fans’ love of the original onto this Darcy novel,
but it cannot stand alone. However, judged as a companion novella, it is an
interesting, clever idea and I think fans will love it.
I received this novel from NetGalley in exchange for
an honest review.
No comments:
Post a Comment