Once again, the dangers of allowing me loose online or in a library result in me reading a random book I found while looking for something else specifically. Don’t get me wrong, I would’ve read this eventually—it’s a Jane Austen fan fiction/retelling/spinoff with reverse genders set at Christmas.
Honestly, I wasn’t even aware Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe existed, but since I found it on Overdrive I’ve found out that they made a Hallmark movie of it and you KNOW I will be watching that this coming curl up inside because it’s cold outside and watch questionable movies season.
This is the first gender swapped version I’ve read and it was a little underwhelming. This is because the genders were reversed and yet the protagonist remained the female, so instead of seeing the story from Luke Bennett’s point of view (i.e. the original but in male form) it was a retelling from Darcy Fitzwilliam’s point of view in female form. But the character ran a little too close to the Prejudice of Lizzie Bennet than the Pride of Fitzwilliam Darcy on one to many occasions for me.
Because we know the Bennet family so intimately and they are so much a part of the cultural zeitgeist (at least in a lot of English speaking places), not getting to spend time with the Bennet’s really took the book away from a great read for me. There are wonderful books about the fabulously wealthy and how they interact with each other and there are wonderful books about fabulously wealthy who fall in love with someone not so wealthy, but this one just didn’t work for me in this case because of all the cultural baggage Pride and Prejudice has.
“See, it is a truth universally acknowledged that any beautiful, brilliant, single woman who is rich as hell will be in want of a husband. She’d heard it time and time again.” (Loc 61)
As a romance novel if it would’ve been called something else and the characters names would’ve been different it was a solid 3-4 star read. It was fast paced, had the drama leading up to a required will she/won’t she moment and a happily ever after.
I was glad to see de la Cruz include a gay character and honestly I’d rather have read that story.
“Jim laughed, not breaking eye contact. Bingley smiled, pleased with himself. If Darcy knew Bingley at all, she knew he had a crush. Darcy would probably have had a crush on Jim, too, if she hadn’t known that he was gay and would never go for a girl like Darcy anyway. Jim was grounded and centered; he valued service, education, and even a touch of spirituality. The last things he cared about were status, luxury, and vindication, the pillars on which Darcy thrived.” (Loc. 402)
The setting weirdly worked and was reminiscent of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible. What is it with P&P retellings and Ohio? I feel like they should be set in New Jersey and NYC can be the London of the age, but with airlines and what not I guess it’s give or take these days.
de la Cruz did give a nod to the literary proclivities of Darcy and Lizzie with a plethora of books listed throughout. Below are the ones that I actually flagged, but I’m sure there were others.
- Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
- Peter Pan – J.M. Barrie
- Common Sense on Mutual Funds – John C. Bogle
- The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
- The Intelligent Investor – Benjamin Graham
- Annie – Harold Gray
- Think and Grow Rich – Napoleon Hill
- Rent – Jonathan Larson
- Reminiscences of a Stock Operator РEdwin Lef̬vre
- One Up on Wall Street – Peter Lynch
- Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream – William Shakespeare
- War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Recommendation: For a Jane Austen fan fiction novel this one left me pretty meh. It worked as a romance novel, but I’d rather de la Cruz have renamed the characters and title to make this be a stand alone solid romance rather than a meh Jane Austen retelling. That being said, I will of course watch the Hallmark movie of this, but only begrudgingly because I’m assumming they’ve straight-washed it as Bingley isn’t even listed in the characters on IMDB.
Opening Line: “A Taylor Swift cover of “Last Christmas,” originally recorded by Wham! in 1986, strummed from the stereo of the sleek, black town car, where Darcy was sitting in the backseat.”
Closing Line: “She couldn’t wait to introduce her daughter to the world she came from.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)
Additional Quotes from Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe
“The way Darcy saw it, she’d have real passionate love or she would have none at all.” (Loc. 73)
“Wanting to be near family and actually being near family were two completely different things.” (Loc. 105)
“If Chris Mayfair was catalog handsome and Bingley Charles was movie star handsome and Luke Bennet was real-life-person handsome, then Carl Donovan was simply nice-looking.” (Loc. 534)
“Darcy watched their hands in mittens latch on to each other as they skated away like a pair of turtle doves—whatever the hell those were. Darcy still didn’t know.” (Loc. 1,451)
“I don’t understand why I can’t just call him like a normal millennial would. Or even better, send a text.” (Loc. 1,332)
Test.