Thursday 9 February 2012

REVIEW: Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star by Heather Lynn Rigaud

Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star by Heather Lynn Rigaud


Publication Date:September 1st 2011
Publisher:Sourcebooks, Incorporated
Paperback, 432 pages



Darcy's as hot as he is talented...

Fast music, powerful beats, and wild reputations-on and off stage-have made virtuoso guitarist Fitzwilliam Darcy's band into rock's newest bad boys. But they've lost their latest opening act, and their red-hot summer tour is on the fast track to disaster. Now Darcy and bandmates Charles Bingley and Richard Fitzwilliam are about to meet their match...

But she's about to rock his world...

Enter Elizabeth Bennet, fiercely independent star of girl-band Long Borne Suffering. Elizabeth, her sister Jane, and friend Charlotte Lucas have talent to spare and jump at the opening band slot. Elizabeth is sure she's seen the worst the music industry has to offer. But as the days and nights heat up, it becomes clear that everyone is in for a summer to remember.


As soon I started reading Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star I truly believed that I had in my hands the best fan fiction I have ever read and a really good contemporary romance title. I'm sad to say that by the time I had read the first 1/3 of the book, my opinion started to change rapidly, only to leave me by the end exhausted and feeling that I have read one of the worst contemporary titles ever. I mean this book literally sucked the life force out of me...

I'll start by telling what I liked in this book and why I forced myself to finish it and what made me have such a good impression of it at first. Rigaud, does an amazing job at presenting and "modernising" characters that we all know since our childhood. She took Austen's characters and really made them look like people who live in modern times. In most fan fiction titles I have read, authors fail miserably in that department, but Rigaud truly gave to her characters a modern voice that were in essence the same characters we all know, but could as well be characters we first met in her novel. Don't know if I'm making much sense, but bottom line, the character building and the story building came off as something really fresh.

And those sadly, are the only good characteristics of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star.
This book in unnecessarily too long, with details that if omitted, I would now be talking about one of the best books I have ever read. I mean, when I read the first sex scene between Charlotte and Richard (yeah that Charlotte and Richard Fitwilliam, Darcy's cousin who have a rather extended role in this novel), I said ok, that's a nice way to twist the plot a little. When I read the next sex scene between Charles and Jane, I said again,ok, they were one of the main couples in the original book as well... But soon after, this book was just an endless purple prose with constant sex scenes between pretty much everyone. And we're talking about really long sex scenes, the kind that the couple ends the first intercourse and then proceeds immediately to the second...
You know me, I don't mind sex scenes in my books, but there's a limit to everything. There's that line that should a writer cross it, the result isn't a sexy book but something else entirely.

As I said, this book is way tooooooo long... And I can't stress this strong enough. Most of my problems begin from this fact. There were so many details, so many times the POV changed that should I haven't read Pride and Prejudice previously I would be completely at a loss. The book is being narrated from almost everyone's POV. And we are talking about at least 7 characters here. Before soon I had a bit of a headache, even if I was already acquainted with all those characters.
So, despite all the good attributes and twists to the story Rigaud added, the result was a tiring book, that lacked in the editing department and that is completely a shame, cause the author tried. Rigaud really tried to deliver a unique story and she could have done it if someone left out about 150 pages...
Add to that the completely unbelievable ending ( I mean how possible is it really that a 3 member male band and a 3 member girl group ends up matched and married???) and you can imagine my feelings exactly.

So, no matter how much I wanted to like Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star, and even if there were some things I really liked and appreciated in Rigaud's effort, the result was a book I couldn't wait to finish and proceed to something else, forgetting that I have ever read it. And that really saddens me, cause it had all the potential to be a great book.



2 comments:

  1. I could not finish this book. The dialogue was horrible plus everything else you said. I have no idea how this got published, I have read better unpublished fanfic online.... Great review!
    NC
    Truly Bookish

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow, I had read great reviews about this book before, but the things like the enormous amount of sex made me delete it from my wishlist. Thanks for the warnings, that is not something I enjoy in my books.

    ReplyDelete

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