Speaking of JAFF

[swedepea]

I pretty much wasted my whole long weekend on a JAFF kick.  I blame this on PD James and Death Comes to Pemberley.  In a word, it was pretty awful (okay, that's two words).  I posted on twitter that I gave it 2.5/5 stars, and Shem told me she thought I was being too generous, and I'm inclined to agree.  I will put my comments under a cut to hide any spoilers, though I don't really think they are terribly spoiler-ish (honestly, I don't feel there's much to spoil, and I certainly won't say whodunnit).


Strikes against it:

• Significant passages that were summaries of the original book. 
• Apart from character names and places, very little resemblance to P&P.  Col. Fitzwilliam is now a very serious middle-aged man who has lost all sense of humor, what??  And actually, doubts and shadows were cast on several characters, making them seem altogether different from what we see in JA, including several times when I started to think the author was hinting that Darcy and Lizzy did NOT, in fact, have a happy marriage, but then she never expounded one way or the other.
• Quotes from the book (and I'm not entirely sure a few of them weren't actually from P&P2, and not the book at all) thrown in here and there in what feels to me a very amateurish fanfic "hey, look how clever *I* am, sneaking quotes from the original into my story in new and different scenes" kind of way.  A la, in reference to some feud between the Darcy family and a neighboring estate, Darcy's father was the first to attempt to "heal the breach."  Clever, very clever.
• Virtually NO interaction btwn Darcy and Lizzy.  They weren't even in the same place most of the time.
• Once we finally DO see them together, at the very end, one would never know they'd been married 6 years (as is the premise of said book).  Darcy's all, "there are some things we should have discussed long ago" and then goes into...actually I don't remember what he went into (you can tell it was memorable), but essentially it was stuff so fundamentally basic about his own character and family that you know they would have discussed it within the first week of being engaged.  It would be a very sad marriage indeed if this hadn't come up in *6 years*.
• The story, or lack thereof.  It was just a bad story and a bad mystery.  Very pedantic in places (lots of places).  I kept waiting for the clever twist that makes mysteries enjoyable.  Never came.  There was a bit of a love story involving Georgiana and will she pick Suitor #1 or Suitor #2, except that the story was only touched on periodically and she never showed interest in more than one of the suitors and there was never really any clash or difficult choice.
• I've read far better writing and far more compelling stories online.

Points FOR it (stealing this blatantly from Shem, b/c I can't think of anything else):

• I now have the phrase "this was carved in HATE NOT LOVE!" to add to my vocabulary.

Summary:  Don't bother.  Find a mediocre P&P Mystery on DWG and your time will be better spent.  :-/

This is what led me to spending my weekend reading P&P fanfic.  Something in my brain was looking forward to reading a good P&P story when I started this book (or *hoping* for it, I should say, as I'd read some of the reviews on Amazon, but I was hoping they were just jaded and purists).  As it thoroughly failed to deliver, I went searching for better.  Speaking of which, if anyone's read some good ones recently (or even not so recently), feel free to recommend! :-)