I don’t do well with conventional romance novels; I don’t have much patience for personal drama among other reasons. For some reason though I’m usually ok with romantasy, and queer romances. I figured a Jane Austen riff should be safe; wrong. If you take away the manners and the romanticized culture/world, these people are terrible. There’s no one to really like. Not even the couples. You’re supposed to like at least one character in a romance, or least have a couple you hope gets things/themselves together.
The one part I did like about Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors is working out who was whom, modern to Austen parallels. Sometimes there’s a name cue, like there’s a Darcy (obvs) although their Elizabeth is named otherwise and the personalities/roles are flipped. Wickham is genuinely terrible, as in that person needs to be locked up; the only reason they weren’t years ago is that the Raje (main family of the story) family was apparently more concerned about the social implications of something being public than anything, which is part of the main problem of the story. There’s also an Emma who, as might be expected, is quite stubborn, but she’s more of a side character. She’s actually Trisha Raj’s patient. Trisha being the “heroine”, a genius surgeon who just won a major research grant, but is nevertheless the black sheep of her politically ambitious family. She seems to be the sort of person who just expects people to understand and know how she feels and then gets upset when they don’t. She even admits at one point she gets so focused on the challenge in front of her (medical, often) that she ignores everything/everyone else. Her parents are either weak (mom) or blinded by specific ambition for his kids (dad) and neither one seem to care about much other than status.
Trisha’s got a handful of siblings, and it seems like she always expects the worst of them (and most everyone else) when there may not be reason for that. The siblings all have relationship and/or professional challenges but we don’t get to see a lot of them. It’s mostly Trisha trying to convince Emma to let her do the scary surgery, trying to re-join her family (kind of), and feeling attracted to the chef her family hires for a political gala. JD (said chef) has some kind of hidden history, and it turns out he’s Emma’s totally protective brother. JD and Trisha have little to no chemistry, and no one else is very likeable either. This is expected for the parents in an Austen story, as well as the villain. But no one else has enough personality or good qualities to want them to get anywhere. There’s a lot of convoluted unravelling both past and present schemes from various sides, which is kind of Austen but to me really more modern soap opera, and that’s nope for me.
I was in the library; it was almost Valentine’s Day. I tried. It just did not work out this time.