To Buy or Not to Buy: My Pride, His Prejudice by Jenni James

My Pride, His Prejudice (Austen in Love Book 1) by Jenni James


Book Description (From Amazon):
When Will Darcy proposes out of the blue, Eliza Bennet's world comes crashing down. Of course she tells him no, but why would he ask her in the first place? Haven’t they always been enemies? For the past year, Eliza has worked for Will's company, Revolutionary Innovations, as an efficiency expert. Her whole goal has been to raise profits, finish her contract, and then get out. She assumed Will wanted the same, but now she's not so sure. And more importantly, she has begun to wonder if she made a mistake in telling him no.

Jenni James, author of The Jane Austen Diaries series for teens, does it again! Now she's creating a whole new series just for adults, Austen in Love. Book #1 is a delightful adaptation of Pride and Prejudice that has all the components of Jane Austen's amazing love story, sticking true to the original theme, while taking modern liberties to give this a fresh, new twist for the clean romance genre.

My First Impression:
This story doesn’t start when Elizabeth meets Fitzwilliam Darcy. It begins when he proposes. The only trouble as, as with Jane Austen original story, Eliza is less than accepting of Will’s proposal and even goes so far as to believe he is joking. She insists he never liked her, so why would he propose. She just can’t accept that he could really have feelings for her. He is handsome, rich, owns his own company and is her boss. She is a hired consultant to get his company on track. Love was never part of the contract.

Naturally, she turns him down and she has a weekend to get herself together before she has to face him at work Monday. What she finds is a distracted man, clearly upset but unwilling to speak about it. Eliza believes that she is the cause of his lack of composure, but he assures her she is not. He informs he needs to leave for a few days to take care of some personal business which he won’t disclose and asks Eliza to cover for him. Despite the unfortunate proposal attempt, he still trusts her to take care of his company.

Eliza finally worms the story out of him how his 18 year old sister, Georgia has eloped to Las Vegas with his old partner, George Wickham who goes by the nickname Joe. No one has seen her or heard from in several days and Will needs to go find her. While his story may be softening her opinion of him, he takes it a step further and kisses her before he leaves her office.

I’m not quite sure what to think of this one. I do have other books by Jenni James and I have a large number of modern retellings of Jane Austen’s stories, but perhaps this is one too many. I think I need to mull this one over for a while.


Decision?
Not to buy…for now.