Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Unequal Affections: A Pride and Prejudice Retelling

So after two swings and misses on the Jane Austen fanfic, I went back to my GR friend Shifra's list of her top 10 JAFF novels, and read the Kindle sample of the one that came out on top, which was this one. It hooked me in enough that I actually decided to pay for it (it wasn't cheap, fair warning, but I was really needing some good P&P fanfic to take the taste of the mediocre ones out of my mouth).

In this iteration of Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy's tale, the point of divergence occurs when Darcy makes his first proposal to Elizabeth while she's visiting her friend Charlotte (who recently married Mr Collins). Rather than turning Darcy down flat, she asks him for some time to think about his proposal. Yes, she's still angry about his interference in Jane's and Wickham's lives, but he's intelligent, rich and handsome, and he inexplicably (to Elizabeth) has fallen in love with her, and he's promising to take care of her family if and when needed ... I guess this version of Elizabeth is a little more practical-minded than the original.

So after several days of mulling things over, Elizabeth accepts Darcy's proposal, though she warns him that she's not in love with him. Not a problem! says Darcy, sure that she'll fall for him soon. But as things develop, there are naturally bumps in the road (many of them familiar to P&P fans), Elizabeth isn't falling in love very quickly, and there are ample reasons during the engagement for both Elizabeth and Darcy to wonder if they're really doing the right thing. These being Regency times, it's very difficult to back out of an engagement, though.

So yes, I really did enjoy this one. It's much more romantic and relationship-focused than the original P&P, but it's pretty true to the original story and characters, and far more intelligently written than your run-of-the-mill fanfic. Lara Ormiston does a great job of digging into the characters' flaws and making them work through issues with a fair degree of realism.

And I'm a romantic at heart, I guess. This one got me in the feels. I probably wouldn't recommend this book to those who aren't down with Regency romance. But if you are, this one really is well done for the genre. It’s up near the top of my own JAFF list too! Will def reread when I need a romance fix.