Linda Berdoll, Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife. Jane Austen sequels may be legally publishable, but they’re still fanfic. Some of them are very good fanfic indeed, though I have yet to read the Austen equivalent of Lust over Pendle.
Well.
Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife reads like a fanfic that started life as a PWP, had a plot added on later (and reasonably successfully), but didn’t get a good beta.
It’s a very entertaining read; I did make it all the way through. Though the characters don’t all act like Austen’s, in most cases I could buy it as a personality trait that had no opportunity to come up in P&P.
It’s also got a great deal of gratuitous explicit sex, or rather explicit details about non-explicit sex; the opening chapter pretty much sets the tone there. (After a while, I started thinking “okay, let me start checking off Mr. and Mrs. Darcy’s adventures against the Purity Test”.) The timeline jumps around a lot; viewpoint characters give flashbacks of earlier scenes that really don’t add to our understanding of the event or that don’t add enough to justify the confusion in timeline. Some of the viewpoint characters could have been dropped from the story without losing anything (Juliette, for example, while an interesting person, doesn’t do enough to justify her viewpoint scenes, and yes, I’m implying that her message conveyance at the end was unnecessary).
Basically, it reads like an editor never got their hands on the manuscript (a developmental editor, not a copyeditor; I didn’t notice any major typos or continuity errors). There’s plenty of interesting and entertaining elements in the story; a good editor at the publishing house could have helped Berdoll turn this into an excellent book. As it is, I’m very glad I checked it out from the library, because I’d be pretty underthrilled if I’d spent money on it.
And speaking of legal fanfic: Laurie King, O, Jerusalem and Justice Hall, two of the Holmes and Russell mysteries. Enjoyable rereads; Justice Hall didn’t feel quite as sappy on this read as on my first reading, although I still find Gabriel Hughenfort too good to be true.
Non-fanfic: Glen Cook, Bitter Gold Hearts. A fantasy noir. I didn’t actually finish this one; it’s well-written, but not my cuppa.
