A review by dracula_but_slay
Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

funny lighthearted medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

Absolutely no hate to people who love romcoms. I’m sure most of them are good! I actually quite enjoy the original Pride and Prejudice, which is essentially the mother of all modern romcoms. Eligible, however, was quite possibly the worst reading experience I’ve ever had 🩷 I’m absolutely gobsmacked at how you can possibly fumble an adaptation of such a beloved classic this hard. Honestly, it’s kind of impressive. None of the characters felt like the originals in any way whatsoever. They’re all insufferable jerks who think they’re better than everyone else — and that’s not including if they’re also racist, homophobic, fatphobic, antisemitic, AND transphobic?!?!?? Yes, those are all very real qualities given to some of these characters (Mrs. Bennet being the most egregious example who quite literally is every type of -phobic and -ist the author could possibly think of). Is any meaningful commentary given on ANY of these issues? Ha, no. If you’re lucky Elizabeth will spout some smart comment condemning a thing, but it basically just amounts to “racism is bad 🤩” (or whatever equivalent for the topic at hand). Elizabeth herself probably suffered the most at the hands of the author. She is SO insufferable. She thinks she’s better than everyone yet constantly needs to tie herself to some man — including a married man! Yes, the beloved Elizabeth Bennet is a home wrecker!!!! Classy!!!! And if the man — married or otherwise — doesn’t work out, boy can you count on some strong self-pity that just NEVER ends and is overall miserable to read. As for the plot, if this wasn’t an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, I think I’d be totally lost. There are so many barely related tangents in this almost 500 page book it’s difficult to keep track of what’s happening. At one point the plot is literally “oh no the house has spiders and we can’t sell the house if it has spiders so we gotta kill the spiders but oh no people don’t wanna buy houses with spiders so we didn’t sell the house but we killed the spiders yay!” No I am not joking. The sheer amount of useless 1-2 page chapters probably doesn’t help. I don’t think an editor was consulted for this book and it shows. This also causes characters to be left out for large chunks of the story. I forgot BINGLEY, one of the MAIN LOVE INTERESTS, was a character until like the last 100 pages of the book. Also Charlotte and Mr. Collins are never heard from again after Elizabeth visits them. Basically, if the characters aren’t immediately important to the plot, you can just forget about them. Chances are high you won’t see them again (sorry to you Charlotte Lucas stans out there). Even the TITLE OF THE BOOK doesn’t have as much relevance as you’d think it would. The fictional reality show that is the book’s namesake comes up in the beginning and the end. It maybe takes up 200 pages of the book at most (although granted, I consider that a blessing given the hot mess that is Jane and Bingley’s wedding which yes, we do get to see. No, it is not very enjoyable). All of this, combined with the bizarre timeline that I can’t quite grasp, makes Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship at the end of the novel feel totally unearned. I swear we get what occurred in the original over a year in the span of like a month. Although again, I’m not quite sure! The timeline in this book is very confusing because of all its tangents! But whatever the timeline is, it felt way too short for the large amount of character development Darcy and Elizabeth go through. This is not helped by the fact Darcy and Elizabeth have sex SEVERAL TIMES quite early in the book???????? Way to dash a lot of the romantic tension there. The author must have been aware of that because Darcy conveniently disappears from the story soon enough. I think I can best articulate how horrible this book was by drawing your attention to its final chapter: the final chapter of this slowburn romance, focusing on a beloved literary couple….. FOCUSES ON MARY BENNET AND NOT THE COUPLE. SPECIFICALLY MARY AND HER LOVE FOR BOWLING????????? YES, THAT IS A THING. I genuinely had nothing to say when I saw THAT was how this whole story ended, and I think it sums up the experience well: Eligible is not really about the romance between Darcy and Elizabeth or even Bingley and Jane. It sees itself as a commentary on current societal issues, especially involving women, but its commentary amounts to nothing. It offers nothing new; it doesn’t even offer any potential solutions. To Elgible, if you’re a woman, either find a man who treats you right or go bowl or something. You can’t have both. And if you’re part of another marginalized group? Uhhh I don’t know, explain that you just have a birth defect or something and that’s why society treats you badly. YEAH, DON’T THINK I’M IGNORING THAT. The treatment of the one trans character is one of the worst things I have EVER seen. The birth defect argument is a GENUINE attempt to explain transness and it just… does NOT work. Once you find out he’s trans all the characters and the book itself treat him like a freaking zoo animal. It’s disgusting. His transness is also supposed to be the equivalent of Wickham’s big scandal in the original?! Which, for a book claiming to be so progressive, is a HORRIBLE way to portray transgender people. They also included a slur for trans people because why not! Yes, there’s an actual slur in this book on top of everything else!! But even the removal of this slur or other problematic commentary would not fix this book. It is fundamentally flawed at its core. The moment you twisted these beloved characters to be unrecognizable, you failed to make a good adaptation. I believe in the conspiracy theory that this author wrote a subpar romcom and reskinned it to appeal to the Austen girlies. While this might work for some, it does NOT work for me. You can enjoy this book all you want, but I personally never want to even touch it ever again. 
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