Publication date: July 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4116-5
Fantasy Romance
Paperback
Reviewed by Gina
Flip, short for Phillipa, Allison is a modern woman with modern ideas and when her book club is about to dig into Pride and Prejudice, she’d prefer to curl up with a steamy erotic romance. While she’d really like to leave her ex-husband Jed behind, due to their careers, their paths continue to cross. With a proposal that could be a make or break for her career, Flip opts for a massage guaranteed to relax. Finding about an hour in her day she heads on over to Madame K’s for said massage, intrigued by the idea of being able to imagine herself in her favorite book. Flip intends to journey to Venice where she will engage in some hot sex on a bathroom sink and settles into her massage. There is a bit of a glitch, however, and she ends up in the middle of Pride and Prejudice. Despite Madame K’s explanation of the rules of the massage-you-into-a-book, Flip somehow manages to not only become a participant in Pride and Prejudice, she manages to alter the entire story. With only twenty-four hours to set the story back to rights Flip needs to join forces with the one man she really doesn’t want to join up with and no, it’s not her husband.
Magnus Knightly is the be all and end all authority on Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice. He closely guards the tenets of Ms. Austen’s story telling, yet he finds he cannot resist Flip’s charms.
Ex-husband Jed, along with his current squeeze, Io, is certain Flip is on to something career moving and joins in the pursuit. Io is certain Jed is cheating on her and follows his every move to keep from losing her hard won goal—Jed. With only hours to go, will Flip be able to save the true telling of Pride and Prejudice?
Take a poorly written chik lit, add in some junior high cliquish attitude and some choppy erotic threads and you have SEDUCING MR. DARCY. The addition of clichés and reliance on modern television shows, movies and books doesn’t help out this annoying story.
As an avid fan of time travel, the premise of SEDUCING MR. DARCY was intriguing to me. Not a time travel per se, but with that same call of adventure and the opportunity to travel to another time in place sitting there all the same. Imagine becoming a hero or heroine in your favorite novel! Becoming the heroine you wish you were more like and pursued by the hero you long for (and vice versa).
Sadly, SEDUCING MR. DARCY disappoints on many levels. From the outside the heroine’s nick name, Flip, stopped me in my tracks every time I read it—and it is written many, many times Dialogue meant to be snappy chik lit falls short with its choppy writing and interspersion of references to televisions shows, it becomes a Sex in the City wannabe. Many scenes conjured memories of really bad junior high humor, but worst of all were the attempts at erotica. The scene where Io bares her privates, covered in chamomile to sooth the itch of crabs was over the top. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t sexy and it lowered an already badly told story to utter street smut.
The editing was well done, no obvious mis-spellings and punctuation was professionally done. The concept was intriguing, but somehow just did not deliver.
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