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A review by hollidayreadswithme
Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld
2.0
First of all, this book is too damn long.
It's very funny to see Liz being portrayed as someone weak from what I remember from the original book she wasn't weak and now we have her having an affair with a married man and fawning over Darcy. I'm not sure what I can say about her except that I don't care for her because she's not the oldest and yet she feels responsible for everybody.
There aren't a lot of differences except what is considered acceptable has changed they are the same upper middle class white people however one is asexual the other is old and because of the age, that is where we get the insistence must be married. However all of that is very played out in today's society. People are no longer using that marriage as a stepping stone to the next thing. If they were talking culturally about a different culture, maybe it would make more sense.
I find it frustrating that the thing Jane and Chip have a disagreement about is about whether or not James looks like an expensive gift from Chip and Darcy taking that to mean that she doesn't love him. and the fact that her sisters tease Mary mercilessly about being gay because she has no interest in being matched. The fact that Liz has to do research about how to deal with a transgender family member, or what asexuality is, speaks to the fact that she's not good at her job. She is riding for a feminist magazine Mascara and does not have any information about the transgender movement.
This book reads like it was written by someone who wanted to take all the things that the Baby Boomers were afraid of and stockpile them into one book. Jane is pregnant out of wedlock, Liz is sleeping with a married man, Mary doesn't want anybody, Lydia is married to a transgender man, and Kitty is dating a black guy. All of Mrs. Bennett's nightmares. I'm not sure if it was hinted in the original book that Mrs. Bennet was racist but the way they work to that end was awful.
It felt like a massive deviation from the plot. It felt like Sittenfeld didn’t know how to keep it current, considering that there was language from the original era peppered throughout the book. Making Georgie an anorexic was just a throwaway. Unconscionable. Because if you are going to bring up something serious like that; it has to be dealt with, not just mentioned. Splitting Wickham’s character into Jasper and Ham was a weird step in the wrong direction; the whole point of the tension between Lydia and Wickham was that he was a wicked man and everyone warned her but she didn’t listen. Creating a trangender man to take that place doesn’t really sound right.
With all that said, I’ll give it a 2 out of 5 stars. There were so many things that I didn't like that I could go on for ages but the main fact is that it was wholly disappointing and too long for what it could have accomplished in half the pages.
2019 POPSUGAR Reading Challenge - A retelling of a classic
2019 ATY Challenge - 4 books inspired by the wedding rhyme: Book #2 Something New
It's very funny to see Liz being portrayed as someone weak from what I remember from the original book she wasn't weak and now we have her having an affair with a married man and fawning over Darcy. I'm not sure what I can say about her except that I don't care for her because she's not the oldest and yet she feels responsible for everybody.
There aren't a lot of differences except what is considered acceptable has changed they are the same upper middle class white people however one is asexual the other is old and because of the age, that is where we get the insistence must be married. However all of that is very played out in today's society. People are no longer using that marriage as a stepping stone to the next thing. If they were talking culturally about a different culture, maybe it would make more sense.
I find it frustrating that the thing Jane and Chip have a disagreement about is about whether or not James looks like an expensive gift from Chip and Darcy taking that to mean that she doesn't love him. and the fact that her sisters tease Mary mercilessly about being gay because she has no interest in being matched. The fact that Liz has to do research about how to deal with a transgender family member, or what asexuality is, speaks to the fact that she's not good at her job. She is riding for a feminist magazine Mascara and does not have any information about the transgender movement.
This book reads like it was written by someone who wanted to take all the things that the Baby Boomers were afraid of and stockpile them into one book. Jane is pregnant out of wedlock, Liz is sleeping with a married man, Mary doesn't want anybody, Lydia is married to a transgender man, and Kitty is dating a black guy. All of Mrs. Bennett's nightmares. I'm not sure if it was hinted in the original book that Mrs. Bennet was racist but the way they work to that end was awful.
Spoiler
Can we talk about Jasper's incident, why were we accusing him of being a racist? I can understand him being a philanderer because that's bad enough but because we wanted to make sure that the audience still like Liz after she was also in that affair and, coincidentally has no consequences for have a year’s long affair with a married man with a kid.It felt like a massive deviation from the plot. It felt like Sittenfeld didn’t know how to keep it current, considering that there was language from the original era peppered throughout the book. Making Georgie an anorexic was just a throwaway. Unconscionable. Because if you are going to bring up something serious like that; it has to be dealt with, not just mentioned. Splitting Wickham’s character into Jasper and Ham was a weird step in the wrong direction; the whole point of the tension between Lydia and Wickham was that he was a wicked man and everyone warned her but she didn’t listen. Creating a trangender man to take that place doesn’t really sound right.
With all that said, I’ll give it a 2 out of 5 stars. There were so many things that I didn't like that I could go on for ages but the main fact is that it was wholly disappointing and too long for what it could have accomplished in half the pages.
2019 POPSUGAR Reading Challenge - A retelling of a classic
2019 ATY Challenge - 4 books inspired by the wedding rhyme: Book #2 Something New