Compulsively Mr. Darcy by Nina Benneton

I am what you would call a completer. I compulsively need to finish the things I start. So there are very few movies that I haven't watched to the end, including "Easy Rider," which becomes utterly intolerable after the graveyard scene. And
there are very few books in my life that I have not been able to finish; I think the count up till today is one, although there may have been another back in my pre­ school days before I started really keeping track of such things. I tell you this
because Nina Benneton's "Compulsively Mr. Darcy" is challenging even my deeply rooted compulsion to finish reading it. I am on page 83, and I must admit defeat.

This is the second time tonight I have wanted to stop reading this book. While I'm now on Chapter 11, the first I wanted to stop reading altogether was when I got to Chapter 7 and read the title "Charles Bingley is a Lucky Whore." Now, if you've
ever read Pride and Prejudice," Jane Austen's great novel of society, love and manners, you know the character of Charles Bingley, who falls in love with the
Bennet family's oldest daughter Jane. He is a sweet, gentle, bumbling teddy bear of a Regency millionaire, and also Mr. Darcy's best friend. To call him "a lucky whore" is so totally wrong on so many levels, that I almost feel as though I need to throw up. And to have that offensive phrase come out of Benneton's modernized version of Elizabeth Bennet, the clever but innocent heroine of
Austen's novel, is also 50 shades of wrong.

The only real question for me, then, is why I read this far. I've got to give it to Benneton. The initial concept was clever. Darcy is travelling with buddy Bingley to Vietnam, because the Hursts (Bingley's sister and her husband) want to adopt a baby. Elizabeth is an infectious disease doctor at the local hospital there, and Jane runs the orphanage. I don't mind the characters being placed in a uniquely
different situation. I actually think it's clever. But what I like about the many Austen redux novels that I have read, is that the characters retain their basic natures. And I knew this author had lost her course when Elizabeth mentioned that her sisters Mary and Kitty has asked her for prescriptions for birth control. Funny, since those are the 2 sisters in Austen's original novel who do NOT get married, but wrong and perverse. And while to me it's OK for Joan Aiken to take a character like Mary Bennet or Jane Fairfax and make her more adventurous, or give her more of a social conscience. But to have the young girls ask their Berkley hippie doctor sister for the Pill is a little much for my sensibilities!

I apologize to the author for not being able to finish this book, and to Sourcebooks publishing for therefore not being able to judge it fairly. But I just can't live in a world where Mr. Darcy tells someone to "F off."

Submitted by Gertie