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mamamelreads 's review for:
Pride and Papercuts
by Staci Hart
I was thinking that I would round up this 3.5 star book to a four due to sentimentality for Pride and Prejudice, but after sleeping on it for a night and really evaluating my feelings for this story I'm going to round it down to three stars, even thinking that it might be more worthy of two. Here's the thing ... it's pretty tricky to do a retelling of Pride and Prejudice. The story is so universally loved and so well-known that it's hard not to compare the two books. I've rarely read a retelling of P&P that works. The best ones only use P&P as a loose foundation for a story that doesn't really resemble the original. With the previous books in The Austens series I thought Staci Hart did a fairly good job of using the source material stories, but transplanting things into a modern setting that made sense. I ended up liking the Emma retread, hating the Persuasion one, and ADORING the Sense and Sensibility one. But this story was the first one that made me cringe a bit with its use of the source material.
Here's what happened:
Laney (the Elizabeth Bennet character) is an okay character, but she's no Lizzie Bennet. While Elizabeth is witty and strong and intelligent, Laney comes across as emotional and volatile. She freaks out over EVERYTHING. There are moments when she is talking to Liam (the Darcy character) when out of nowhere she starts berating him. Sometimes it makes a little bit of sense, but other times it just seems ridiculous. Why would anyone fall in love with a person so moody? Her verbal sparring with Liam doesn't come across as witty and clever like the Elizabeth/Darcy encounters. They are just annoying.
Liam's not much better. He's a giant controlling grump, who has a touch of wimpiness about him as well. For a man who is described as commanding a room whenever he enters, he sure cows to his aunt pretty quickly, even when she is being horrible. His motivations and his explanations for his horrible actions don't fly at all. And the first disastrous declaration of love that was awesome in P&P was infuriating in this one. Liam was a total ninnyhammer to Laney. He didn't seem conflicted in his feelings. He seemed horrible and hateful, and his explanation for why he needed to stay away from Laney was completely dumb.
Wyatt's (Wickham) angle was weird too. I'm sorry, but in this story Wyatt didn't seem all that horrible. Yeah, Laney didn't need to choose him. He had all sorts of red flag warnings regarding his life choices, but he didn't seem nearly as dangerous or manipulative as Wickham. I had a hard time feeling bad about him. And I still don't understand why his actions toward Georgie (Georgiana) were more awful than any other broken engagement in the modern world. Wickham seemed way worse in P&P.
It turns out that this is a spinoff story from Staci Hart's The Bennet Brothers series. I have not read that series, but the events in this one totally tie into that one. In this version, instead of having five Bennet girls, there are four boys and one girl. Three of the boys get their HEA endings in that previous series, and I guess that the actions in one of those stories lead to the hatred that Catherine de Bourgh (same as P&P) has for the Bennets. Since I did not read that series I had NO IDEA what was going on. Why all the anger? It was never adequately explained, so I couldn't feel much depth about the rivalries.
It took forever to get to the payoff moment in this story. I guess that is true to the original P&P, but in P&P the fun was in the journey to get there. I loved seeing Darcy and Elizabeth evolve in their feelings for one another. I loved their sparring. In this one their love seemed to come out of the blue, their fights were more irritating that endearing, and the eventual kiss felt wrong or unexplained in some way. It just seemed like these two people hated each other until they woke up one day and decided that they were Made For Each Other. Unsatisfying.
But the absolute worst thing of all about this story was that Staci Hart tried too hard to keep things true to P&P. Some of the dialogue came straight from that story, and in a modern day setting it sounded totally weird. Cringe-worthy weird. The fighting using Elizabeth and Darcy's words but in a totally different setting and with totally different things going on didn't work at all. The declarations of love using Darcy's words fell flat. The Laney/Catherine encounters using P&P language were almost laughable. It didn't work at all. Staci Hart would have done better to avoid anything close to the original conversations and just made it her own. Because this is the 21st century, lots of the conflicts of P&P don't make any sense in our world. This book did not do a good job of translating into a modern world at all. Like I say, it would have been better to use the bones of P&P and change everything else to make it more applicable to today.
I did really like the Jett (Jane) and Georgie (Georgiana) bonus love story. Their relationship made sense, and I almost wish more time had been spent on them.
I guess this seems like I hated the book, but I didn't. It was readable, and I did enjoy it for the most part. I did think I was going to give it an extra star when I headed to bed last night, but it didn't age well in my head. Too many problems to overcome. But I'm happy for the HEA ending, and this was a nice enough series to keep me entertained this summer. I'm giving it a generous three stars.
Here's what happened:
Laney (the Elizabeth Bennet character) is an okay character, but she's no Lizzie Bennet. While Elizabeth is witty and strong and intelligent, Laney comes across as emotional and volatile. She freaks out over EVERYTHING. There are moments when she is talking to Liam (the Darcy character) when out of nowhere she starts berating him. Sometimes it makes a little bit of sense, but other times it just seems ridiculous. Why would anyone fall in love with a person so moody? Her verbal sparring with Liam doesn't come across as witty and clever like the Elizabeth/Darcy encounters. They are just annoying.
Liam's not much better. He's a giant controlling grump, who has a touch of wimpiness about him as well. For a man who is described as commanding a room whenever he enters, he sure cows to his aunt pretty quickly, even when she is being horrible. His motivations and his explanations for his horrible actions don't fly at all. And the first disastrous declaration of love that was awesome in P&P was infuriating in this one. Liam was a total ninnyhammer to Laney. He didn't seem conflicted in his feelings. He seemed horrible and hateful, and his explanation for why he needed to stay away from Laney was completely dumb.
Wyatt's (Wickham) angle was weird too. I'm sorry, but in this story Wyatt didn't seem all that horrible. Yeah, Laney didn't need to choose him. He had all sorts of red flag warnings regarding his life choices, but he didn't seem nearly as dangerous or manipulative as Wickham. I had a hard time feeling bad about him. And I still don't understand why his actions toward Georgie (Georgiana) were more awful than any other broken engagement in the modern world. Wickham seemed way worse in P&P.
It turns out that this is a spinoff story from Staci Hart's The Bennet Brothers series. I have not read that series, but the events in this one totally tie into that one. In this version, instead of having five Bennet girls, there are four boys and one girl. Three of the boys get their HEA endings in that previous series, and I guess that the actions in one of those stories lead to the hatred that Catherine de Bourgh (same as P&P) has for the Bennets. Since I did not read that series I had NO IDEA what was going on. Why all the anger? It was never adequately explained, so I couldn't feel much depth about the rivalries.
It took forever to get to the payoff moment in this story. I guess that is true to the original P&P, but in P&P the fun was in the journey to get there. I loved seeing Darcy and Elizabeth evolve in their feelings for one another. I loved their sparring. In this one their love seemed to come out of the blue, their fights were more irritating that endearing, and the eventual kiss felt wrong or unexplained in some way. It just seemed like these two people hated each other until they woke up one day and decided that they were Made For Each Other. Unsatisfying.
But the absolute worst thing of all about this story was that Staci Hart tried too hard to keep things true to P&P. Some of the dialogue came straight from that story, and in a modern day setting it sounded totally weird. Cringe-worthy weird. The fighting using Elizabeth and Darcy's words but in a totally different setting and with totally different things going on didn't work at all. The declarations of love using Darcy's words fell flat. The Laney/Catherine encounters using P&P language were almost laughable. It didn't work at all. Staci Hart would have done better to avoid anything close to the original conversations and just made it her own. Because this is the 21st century, lots of the conflicts of P&P don't make any sense in our world. This book did not do a good job of translating into a modern world at all. Like I say, it would have been better to use the bones of P&P and change everything else to make it more applicable to today.
I did really like the Jett (Jane) and Georgie (Georgiana) bonus love story. Their relationship made sense, and I almost wish more time had been spent on them.
I guess this seems like I hated the book, but I didn't. It was readable, and I did enjoy it for the most part. I did think I was going to give it an extra star when I headed to bed last night, but it didn't age well in my head. Too many problems to overcome. But I'm happy for the HEA ending, and this was a nice enough series to keep me entertained this summer. I'm giving it a generous three stars.