Two bits and a book review (Me and Mr. Darcy, minor spoilers)

Two bits:
My boat will be delivered! The very day after I return home! Now I just need to write down the pronunciation of its Chinese name, because I keep forgetting it. Here’s hoping nothing on it’s been broken in its arduous journey.

I’ve offered up a sonnet-to-order over at Live Long & Marry, which is “is a fandom auction to raise money for the fight against the California initiative which will legally destroy existing same-sex marriages and ban any further ones.” Winning bids are paid by being contributed directly to one of several organizations. Bidding runs from July 1, 12:01 Pacific Time, until July 15, 12:01 Pacific Time, 2008. If it’s a cause you’re at all interested in supporting you should go look, because there are way cooler things than my sonnet on offer.

And a review:
Mr. Darcy and Me, by Alexandra Potter
If you’re looking for some light romantic reading with lots of Jane Austen references, if you loved the Jane Austen Book Club and want something else like it, if you love stories of bookish Americans exploring England, this will fill that bill. If you want something that transcends the chicklit category to become something more, then not so much. The main character Emily Bronte Hemingway Albright is a likeable bookish New Yorker, and the supporting characters are something beyond straw figures – they never quite become entirely real, but they can easily be distinguished from each other and the two men in Emily’s life can never be confused. The parallels to the plot of Pride and Prejudice will please Austen fans, and they’re reasonably well done – blatant enough to be unmissable, but they don’t actually beat you over the head. At least, not until toward the end when Emily herself notices them, at which point the reader might want to duck cluebats. There’s also a nifty bit of is-it-or-isn’t-it magic running through the book to add connection to Austen and her characters, and a satisfyingly hapy ending for everyone.

On the other hand, American Emily’s dialogue reads like it’s been written by an Englishwoman who’s spent a fair bit of time in the US, but never reviewed by an actual American. The story is told in first person, and throughout the whole thing Emily enthuses so often about the new Briticisms she’s learned whenever she speaks of “fancying” a man for instance, yet at the end she can casually say “I realized he was winding me up” with no cross-cultural comment. When she first arrives in England, she’s all excited to see a robin – but we *have* robins in America. They’re not the same species as English robins, just red-chested birds the colonists gave the same label to. But most people don’t know that, and at most an American who did would say “I saw an English robin!” or even “…a real robin!” Those are small things, but they don’t help make the character believable.

More important is where Potter allowed the parallels to P&P to lapse. The whole point of of Austen’s novel is that Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy both change – she abandons her prejudices and he his false pride before they can meet in understanding. In contrast, Emily, like Elizabeth, is given reason to believe she’s been wrong – and this parallel to P&P is quite nicely done – but we never are shown that the man in question makes equivalent changes of his own. It feels like Potter was humming along with her storyline until about 2/3 of the way through P&P, then realized her book was getting too long and wrapped it up in a hurry. Or else she lost the courage to continue with her parallel, which is a shame because I think she skipped a crucial part. In P&P Elizabeth’s words have as much effect on Darcy as his letter and change of manner do on her, and that’s why we believe that he’s not an unbending snob, and that she has misjudged him. In M&MD, we only get half of that equation.

Also, maybe it’s just me, but I have trouble believing that a guy with a belly big enough to rest on a pool table has pecs firm enough to inspire such notice. I find it believable that she’d be bothered by the belly, that she wouldn’t be bothered, or that she’d be bothered only while she didn’t like him anyway. Any of those are fine, if you’re consistent about it. But don’t go changing a character’s shape halfway up his ribcage!