Book Club Book Review: Death Comes to Pemberley

Book: Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D. James

Source: Library

Rating: 1 star (Did Not Finish)

Review:

Book club or no book club, this was torturous to read. I decided not to spend any more of my time (as well as my lunch time) trying to read any more of this.

I really wanted to like this. When I read that a mystery was to take place at Pemberley, I thought maybe Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy with all of their curiosity and intellect would try to solve the mystery. I was actually really looking forward to reading this.

But alas, the writing was flat and boring. Death Comes to Pemberley was lacking all the grace, charm and wit that's in a Jane Austen novel. There was a lot of repetition among the writing and Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth barely had any interaction.

The characters have no personality or chemistry and are reduced to nothing short of caricatures. They are bland and their dialogue is stale and cumbersome. The author didn't bother to have the characters to remotely even resemble the characterizations that Jane Austen created. I found them so out of character that they should have be given different names. There is nothing for the reader to recognize from these characters. And another tragedy was that Elizabeth was a shadow of her former self, it's as if once she got married and had children she would no longer be of any importance which is not how the Elizabeth in the original P & P was shown. I think Jane Austen would be horrified that Lizzie was forced into the background.

There was also too much rehashing of what happened in the original Pride and Prejudice story to the reader. I highly doubt someone who hasn't read the original story would bother trying to give this a read if they had not read it. There was no need for that much summarizing and backstory.

I guess I should talk about the mystery or the lack there of because there wasn't much going on in regards to actually trying to solve the mystery. The characters were just doing nothing.

After I decided to just give up reading this (and I had read a good amount of this tiresome book), I checked out some of the reviews and no surprise the ratings were not very good. The next time a book is selected at the book club I'm definitely going to check the ratings before voting for it (especially since I voted for this).