Readers' Favorite

December 27, 2015

Review: A Darcy Christmas by Sharon Lathan, Amanda Grange, and Carolyn Eberhart

by Donna Huber


cover A Darcy Christmas
If you are are a fan of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and enjoy the creative license that authors have taken with the universe she created, then A Darcy Christmas will be just thing to wrap up your Christmas season. This treasury of short stories from Sharon Lathan, Amanda Grange, and Carolyn Eberhart was an enjoyable read.

The collection includes A Darcy Christmas by Sharon Lathan, Christmas Present by Amanda Grange, and Mr. Darcy's Christmas Carol by Carolyn Eberhart.

As I'm not really a Jane Austen fan and have not read Pride and Prejudice, but I did watch the BBC's 1995 production of Pride and Prejudice.  Based on that "research" I feel that these authors did a good job of being faithful to the universe.

(If you are wondering why I had this ebook on my Nook since I'm not an Austen fan. I pickup the Friday Free ebook from Barnes and Noble and this was the feature ebook one week).

In Mr. Darcy's Christmas Carol by Carolyn Eberhart , the first story in the collection, Jane Austen meets Charles Dickens. Ironically, I decided this year to read Dickens's A Christmas Carol (read my review). I had just read the first Stave when I picked up A Darcy Christmas and I did a double take as Mr. Darcy's Christmas Carol begins the same way as Dickens's classic. And I do mean word for word. The similarities continued for the majority of the book. I will also assume that the parts that I knew should have been in Pride and Prejudice (Darcy's proposal and Elizabeth's refusal) were identical. I did feel that creatively this was a bit of a lazy way of writing the story. I expect it in fan fiction, but not in a published book. Though, I guess there is nothing legally wrong as presumably the copyright on these novels have expired.

Christmas Present by Amanda Grange was short and enjoyable, though somewhat forgettable. If you want a glimpse into what the future may hold for the Darcys then you will enjoy this story.

It was the last story in the collection, A Darcy Christmas by Sharon Lathan, that really made me feel that this was more of a collection of fan fiction stories. One of the tropes of fan fiction is the infusion of sex in a story that the original lacked. While the sex was not overly descriptive and therefore not a full blown lemon, it had enough citrus to be a slice. (If you don't read fan fiction: lemons are sex scenes). In addition, this "short story" was a collection of Christmas scenes, or in fan fiction language: one-shots.

I read fan fiction so I'm not against it, but it is not what I'm expecting in a published novel or collection. I'm also not against derivative works of fiction. I recently listened to the audio book version of Longbourn by Jo Baker and I really liked this story about the people below stairs in the Pride and Prejudice universe. It didn't feel like fan fiction.

A Darcy Christmas will satisfy Darcy and Elizabeth fans that need more than what Austen provided.

Buy A Darcy Christmas at Amazon


Book info:
available formats: ebook and print (290 pages)
published: October 2010 by Sourcebooks Landmark
ISBN13: 9781402258053
genre: romance
source: B&N
read: December 2015


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