An Assembly Such as This: A Novel of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman

Four Stars

Quite the title.

I heart Jane Austen novels, and I’m pretty sure all girls agree. There have been many ‘sequels’ to her works, “Pride and Prejudice” in particular. Most of these are crap. Especially the one Cori read. That was dirty crap. Because of this I generally ignore the whole fake sequel genre.

Then Carla recommended the Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman series. Carla is a librarian and knows her stuff and it’s written by a lady from Idaho, so I picked it up.

This is the story of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy told from his perspective. And I have to say, Pamela Aidan did an impressive job of getting into Darcy’s head and telling his story. She does a nice job of sticking to the true story while weaving in new scenes and characters to fill in the gaps. There is a lot of added history from the time period which slow the story down in places, but she presents them as Darcy keeping up on current events which fits his character so it makes sense, even if it does drag a little.

But here’s the kicker. It’s a TRILOGY! She took one novel and rewrote it as a TRILOGY! I want to believe it was done as an artistic choice, she simply could not do justice to the original in only one book, but part of me feels like it’s a ripoff way of making you buy more books. I am still on the library waiting list for numbers two and three. We’ll see if they’re worth it.

I guess I can say that 33% of the way in to this story, I am enjoying it. Ms. Aidan does capture a certain sense of Darcy and seems to have a solid grasp of his original motives as intended by Jane. Unless something really strange happens in the next two, I would recommend this series as an entertaining read and a fun way to revisit the P&P crowd.