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A review by melbsreads
Darcy and Fitzwilliam: A Tale of a Gentleman and an Officer by Karen V. Wasylowski
1.0
This was...not good. It never quite reached "I want to throw it at the wall" status, so it's probably more like a 1.25 star book, but STILL. The characters are universally awful. Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam are both enormously controlling "you-belong-to-me" types. At one point, Darcy spends like three pages screaming at a heavily pregnant Lizzy through her locked bedroom door, then kicks the door in, and has the nerve to be offended when she cowers, because he would NEVER hurt a woman. The women, on the other hand, are all shrewish and foot-stampy types who generally go from throwing things and "I never want to see you again" to "I'm so sorry please forgive me for my womanly stupidity" in the space of one kiss. Add in Caroline Bingley as a manipulative individual who's apparently slept with half the ton, and things are looking pretty awful.
The language was frequently just...wrong. Darcy and Fitzwilliam's relationship is supposed to come across as brotherly, but apparently that just means making a lot of fart jokes and discussing their virility. After one such conversation, Fitzwilliam starts referring to his dick as "the South of France", which leads to ongoing boner references. Add in members of the Royal Family shrieking like banshees in public, the use of the word "fanny" to mean "arse" (which led to both hilarity and cringing), and Lizzy's pregnancy leading her to be "much larger horizontally than vertically" (seriously?!), and I was firmly on the Nope Train.
Honestly, I think one of my biggest problems with this was that in the 50-ish% of the book that features Lizzy and Darcy, NOT ONCE do the Gardiners turn up. NOT. ONCE. Which, given that Austen tells us in the final chapter of P&P that they were frequent visitors to wherever the Darcys were living, seems like a MASSIVE oversight. Sigh. Oh, that and the fact that after trying to break up Darcy and Lizzy's marriage - going so far as to con Darcy into coming to Netherfield under false pretences, then getting him drunk and climbing into his bed naked - the only repercussion that Caroline Bingley receives is marrying a rich dude who lives in Edinburgh and being denied the joys of London. Dude. No.
Look, if you're a huge fan of Col. Fitzwilliam, maybe give it a go? But then again, maybe don't unless you want to see the character you previously enjoyed turned into a slightly abusive douchenozzle...
The language was frequently just...wrong. Darcy and Fitzwilliam's relationship is supposed to come across as brotherly, but apparently that just means making a lot of fart jokes and discussing their virility. After one such conversation, Fitzwilliam starts referring to his dick as "the South of France", which leads to ongoing boner references. Add in members of the Royal Family shrieking like banshees in public, the use of the word "fanny" to mean "arse" (which led to both hilarity and cringing), and Lizzy's pregnancy leading her to be "much larger horizontally than vertically" (seriously?!), and I was firmly on the Nope Train.
Honestly, I think one of my biggest problems with this was that in the 50-ish% of the book that features Lizzy and Darcy, NOT ONCE do the Gardiners turn up. NOT. ONCE. Which, given that Austen tells us in the final chapter of P&P that they were frequent visitors to wherever the Darcys were living, seems like a MASSIVE oversight. Sigh. Oh, that and the fact that after trying to break up Darcy and Lizzy's marriage - going so far as to con Darcy into coming to Netherfield under false pretences, then getting him drunk and climbing into his bed naked - the only repercussion that Caroline Bingley receives is marrying a rich dude who lives in Edinburgh and being denied the joys of London. Dude. No.
Look, if you're a huge fan of Col. Fitzwilliam, maybe give it a go? But then again, maybe don't unless you want to see the character you previously enjoyed turned into a slightly abusive douchenozzle...