Okay, so I’m not really sure where to start with this book. I absolutely *love* Pride and Prejudice, it’s probably one of my favourite books, I could re-read it until the cows come home.

But no-one can write Darcy like Austen, and it seems like anyone who tries just ends up falling about a mile short. This book was set after the end of Pride and Prejudice; Darcy and Elizabeth are newly married and are in wedded bliss. But then something happens to throw their relationship off course and it’s supposed to look like it could be the end for this poor couple.

But Darcy and Elizabeth are probably the most in love couple in all of literature, so I highly doubt that a ‘temptation’ like in this book would hurt them this badly. And let’s be honest, without giving away any spoilers, the story doesn’t really contain any ‘temptations’, it’s more confusion than anything.

In Pride and Prejudice, Austen has a way of showing their love in a subtle yet dramatic way. She doesn’t ram it down your throat, but you know that their love is the most powerful kind. But Jeffers has decided that Darcy and Elizabeth should be telling each other how much they are in love every other paragraph, and rather than being sweet, it’s just annoying and unnecessary. After 100+ pages of constant declarations of love, I just wanted to scream at the author to get a grip!!

One thing I did like about the book was the way that Georgiana and Kitty were included more and we got to explore their relationships and see them growing up to become lovely young women, but again, even that was a little over the top and a little too ‘perfect’.

And don’t get me started at the attempts to make the book a little bit racy. It seems like since 50 Shades of Grey, there’s not a single women’s fiction book which is purely romance, it always has to try and work its way down the erotic line too. Frankly, I don’t want to read those kind of scenes from Elizabeth and Darcy, it would have been enough to have the romance without all that. I certainly can’t imagine Austen would have ever written anything like that if she’d written a sequel to P&P.

So overall, I was let down by the book in general, although I shouldn’t have gone in with so high hopes – after all, nothing is going to live up to Austen. The length of the book was an issue for me too. At over 500 pages, it just seemed to drag on, and towards the end it seemed like the author was just thinking of bits to add on so she could get more in. I think the book could have been shortened down to about 300 pages without really losing anything important.

I think I’ll stay away from any other Austen-esque novels for a little while, and hopefully the next one I read won’t be as disappointing as this!