Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Book of the Week: "Mr. Darcy's Diary"

I recently finished reading Mr. Darcy's Diary by Amanda Grange. Since I love Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, I expected to enjoy this book as well. The author writes the storyline of Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of Mr. Darcy. This was one of those books that started out great but left me a little cold at the end. For the first 3/4 of the book, the author wrote very convincingly. I could barely perceive a difference between the character designed by Ms. Austen herself more than a hundred years ago and the voice given by the modern-day Amanda Grange. This was not so much true as the book came to a close. Grange's version of Mr. Darcy comes to see the light too completely to be believed. He suddenly has no difficulty seeing his former behavior as arrogant and wrong. People don't usually come around one hundred percent, even if they do come around. It would have been truer if we could still get little glimpses of Darcy thinking he's all that.

Nevertheless, this book is a great diversion for P&P fans. I didn't mind terribly making it through the less-believable final quarter. If you like Jane enough to be depressed that there won't be any new novels out of her, might as well give this one a read. Darcy is a great character anyway, and I didn't mind spending 320 pages in his head.

No comments: