Mr. Darcy’s Summer of Love (Mr. Darcy In Love, #2)

First Part of Installment Slightly Better than Last, But Then…

I had read the first installment of this novel and was not that thrilled with it because of issues with grammar, poor characterization, and awkward writing. The premise for this novel is a good one, though, even if so far it has not been well executed. So I was curious to see what the author was going to do with the second installment. The same problems persist—the author doesn’t seem to know how to use commas around conjunctions at all—but I found the first part where ODC engaged in some flirtation to be fun, as I always love to see Elizabeth and Darcy together. However, as the installment progressed, I became frustrated with it. Seriously, Lydia, Mrs. Bennet, and Miss Bingley are the absolute worst versions of themselves, so much as to almost be caricatures. It’s bad enough if one or two of them are as awful as they can be, but when it’s all of them, it feels a bit much. I got so frustrated with Elizabeth when she just believed everything that Miss Bingley said, knowing full well that Miss Bingley is malicious. How stupid could Elizabeth get? And then that everything else would flow so terribly from that, with her mother first and then her father… all stemming from the evil Miss Bingley’s machinations. Seriously, the author just took it way too far. Yes, I know the author needed to do so for the plot, but I like to have at least a little reality in my fiction, and this was just beyond the pale.

The author still has problems with wording as well as grammar. For some reason, the author has characters refer to their own family by their titles, even when thinking about them in their own head. For instance, Mr. Darcy often thinks “Miss Darcy” instead of Georgiana. I don’t think of family like that! It just seemed odd. At times the dialogue sounds slightly more formal than our own, which I like to see in historical fiction, but too often the words that came out of their mouths were far too modern; the author played it both ways. They just didn’t use some of those sentenced constructs or have some of our “modern” concepts back in Regency times. Sometimes the writing itself is just incredibly awkward, like when Elizabeth stated that “her heart skitted [sic] in her chest like a frog in a pocket.” The author was also prone to melodrama. For instance, in the early part of the book, Elizabeth thinks, as she contemplates her budding relationship with Mr. Darcy, “a journey abroad now could be the ruin of her entire life!” But the one that really bothered me on several levels was when she had Elizabeth state, when talking about Lady Catherine’s potential disapproval of a match between her and Darcy, “Lady Catherine would have been horrified if she thought her nephew had designs on a ghastly low-born girl like me. And a shotgun wedding would set tongues wagging.” For one thing, I don’t think a proper Regency gentlewoman would attempt to trap a gentleman in that way, but the phrase itself did not come into being until the 1920s! Talk about an anachronism! Even today, it is seen as an American colloquialism, not an English one. As you can tell, I was disappointed by this book.

I received a free copy of this book, but that did not affect my review.