Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe - Melissa de la Cruz

My rating: ⭐

From the cover:

"Darcy Fitzwilliam is 29, beautiful, successful, and brilliant. She dates hedge funders and basketball stars and is never without her three cellphones—one for work, one for play, and one to throw at her assistant (just kidding). Darcy’s never fallen in love, never has time for anyone else’s drama, and never goes home for Christmas if she can help it. But when her mother falls ill, she comes home to Pemberley, Ohio, to spend the season with her family.

Her parents throw their annual Christmas bash, where she meets one Luke Bennet, the smart, sardonic slacker son of their neighbor. Luke is 32-years-old and has never left home. He’s a carpenter and makes beautiful furniture, and is content with his simple life. He comes from a family of five brothers, each one less ambitious than the other. When Darcy and Luke fall into bed after too many eggnogs, Darcy thinks it’s just another one night stand. But why can’t she stop thinking of Luke? What is it about him? And can she fall in love, or will her pride and his prejudice against big-city girls stand in their way?"

I'm a sucker for Pride and Prejudice remakes, so I was excited to read this when it popped up on my radar. Alas, that excitement was short-lived. From the first page, the writing was cringeworthy. Right off the bat, for instance, she describes her approximately 45-year-old driver as having a "grandfatherly" twinkle in his eye and then, sentences later, rejoices over being wrinkle free at the ripe old age of twenty-nine and not looking a day over twenty-four. Exhibit B, my personal favorite example of the lackluster writing, can be found in the descriptions of four of the men in Darcy's life, found mere pages apart from each other.

"Chris had always been handsome, but now, as he approached her, he looked more picture perfect than ever before, a tan, toned, chiseled specimen of a man who looked like he had walked straight out of a Ralph Lauren catalog and into the Fitzwilliam Christmas party."

"If Chris Mayfair was catalog model handsome, Bingley was movie star handsome. He had undeniably sculpted good looks, but unlike Chris, those looks came with character and personality, quirks and asymmetries that made his face just as lovable and unique as it was handsome." (Don't even get me started on making his first name Bingley, good lord.)

"If Chris Mayfair was catalog handsome and Bingley was movie star handsome, then Luke was real-life-person handsome. He had dimples and dark brown eyes and his hair was never anything short of unruly."

"If Chris Mayfair was catalog handsome and Bingley Charles was movie star handsome and Luke Bennet was real-life-person handsome, then Carl Donovan was simply nice-looking."

How does an editor not see this in a book and take it out? Sweet Jesus, come on, that's so bad. And as if the juvenile writing style weren't enough, the story was all over the place and Darcy was flighty, insecure, and judgmental. Every interaction between her and another person featured an inner monologue detailing the other person's flaws and all the ways in which Darcy was better than them, yet inexplicably everyone seemed to think the sun rose and set with her. There was nothing about her I could find to like, from her shoehorned-in name brand impractical outfits down to her hate-love of Gilmore Girls, the show which she describes both as "saccharine, tediously dull" and "quick and witty."

I was sending pictures of particularly awful passages to my sister as I read, and she finally asked how old the author was because she thought the book was written by a teenager trying to imagine what it would be like to be a successful adult. That was exactly the vibe I got from this book, and if it weren't such a quick read and hadn't become entertaining in its awfulness, I would have DNFed after the first couple chapters. Perhaps the biggest letdown was that were it not for the names and inclusion of "Pride and Prejudice" in the title, I never would have pieced together that this was supposed to be a retelling of Jane Austen's classic. If this is what Melissa de la Cruz considers a reimagining of Pride and Prejudice, she may need to revisit the original.