Wednesday, February 6, 2008

An Assembly Such as This

This is the first in a trilogy subtitled "A Novel of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman," so you can understand what attracted me. Pride and Prejudice is one of my all-time favorite books, and I simply adore Jane Austen. Last year I read Stephanie Barron's series featuring Jane Austen as a mystery-solver...delicious! And this year I was determined to read this Darcy series, by Pamela Aidan, to discover his side of my old favorite story.

What a story it is. I won't spoil it with too many details of the events themselves, but suffice it to say that these books bring Darcy to light in a most perfect way. He has ever been enigmatic at best. In P&P, he goes through what looks like a complete transformation of character at a distance--we don't really get to see how he moves from seeming scum to perfect prince, or what he's thinking about it all. Here, you do!

God, what a wonderful, fun, and perfect read. Really, I liked it. Can you tell?

1 comment:

Elin said...

I love that you reviewed these books! - the Fitzwilliam Darcy Novels - I've been wanting to read them, huge Jane Austin fan myself but it got mixed reviews on Amazon, and I haven't been able to find them in the library over here. So now, I think I'll buy them in my next amazon.com purchase.

Thanks Susan! - by the way
I'm now reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini - the author of The Kite Runner. Very good!