Mr. Darcy, Complete Bore

I think I've read my first and last modern adaptation of a Jane Austen work, Mr. Darcy, Vampyre. I picked it up for the most shallow reasons possible:  I love Pride and Prejudice and I love vampires. As I have seen with Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Android Karenina some mashups of old concepts with modern twists are not meant to happen.

austenprose.com

 I have so many complaints about this audio book, but this biggest one being that, it's boring. I found it very charming as Grange wrote a simplistic double wedding for Lizzie and Jane to Darcy and Bingley, respectively. In fact, I could picture in my head the sunlight streaming through the church windows, and I thought to myself, "Why isn't Darcy bursting into flames?". Once the wedding is over Elizabeth and company go on their wedding tour which takes them all over Europe visiting Darcy's VAMPIRE socialite friends, including a famous count who lives alone in a large castle, has villagers storm said castle occasionally, and cannot cast a reflection. I WONDER WHO THAT COULD BE?!

From here there are long arduous paragraphs about traveling, what the Darcys ate and how lonely Elizabeth feels because Darcy won't take her to bed and make her his wife. There is absolutely zero tension apart from an odd middle section where Darcy defeats an evil vampire of unknown origin whose mission is to BED EVERY
VAMPIRE BRIDE EVER MADE. Of course this would not do for Darcy so he comes to Elizabeth's rescue. Might I add that this "evil" vampire had made only two appearances before the final confrontation and did not pose a threat in any way that Darcy did not dispatch with a quick cane slap to the canines. BAD evil vampire! Naughty, wicked, bad villain!

The story concludes with a convenient quick and easy way for Darcy to dispatch himself of the vampire curse (SPOILERS:::: ****** true love and water******), for him to defeat the evil vampire dark lord, dispatch all the haughty socialite friends who disapprove of Elizabeth, bed his wife and return to England for more grand adventures filled with LOOOOOOOVE! Grange doesn't even add anything new to the vampire mythology except for the fact that love can defeat a vampire by giving him third degree burns to the face, vampirism can be cured, and vampire covens each have a unique thing that can harm them (crosses, garlic, sunlight) but never more than one. Nothing original is put into this adaptation, as I had hoped for.

Granted I did find the idea of Mr. Darcy as a seductive, brooding, Snape-ish if you will, vampire attractive. But...nothing happens in the novel! They go on tedious trips with tedious descriptions and meet tedious vampires and will probably go on to have boring children.

Verdict: Do not pick up. It's boring. Snooze fest. Stay away.

Try this instead, Vampire Darcy's Desire. I have no wish to repeat my experience with Amanda Grange but now I feel like I have to pick up this book out of morbid curiosity to see how well, or how badly they treat the vampire trope.

http://www.amazon.com/Vampire-Darcys-Desire-Prejudice-Adaptation/dp/1569757313

"Tormented by a 200-year-old curse and his fate as a half-human/half-vampire dhampir, Mr. Darcy vows to live forever alone rather than inflict the horrors of life as a vampire on an innocent wife. But when he comes to Netherfield Park, he meets the captivating Elizabeth Bennet. As a man, Darcy yearns for Elizabeth, but as a vampire, he is also driven to possess her. Uncontrollably drawn to each other, they are forced to confront a "pride and prejudice" never before imagined--while wrestling with the seductive power of forbidden love. Meanwhile, dark forces are at work all around them. Most ominous is the threat from George Wickham, the purveyor of the curse, a demon who vows to destroy each generation of Darcys."

The Adventures of Huckleberry F(#$

If you haven't already heard about this more recent explosion over the library blogosphere then I am very happy to report it to you, because it is a very tragic situation.

According to an article from USA Today, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer (those rascally fictional characters from beloved author Mark Twain) are getting an upgrade for modern readers:

"Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben is causing a controversy by publishing the combined works of the 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' and 'Tom Sawyer" that features the N-word replaced by "slave" in an effort not to offend readers."

To elaborate, Gribben's reasons for this decision stem not from upsetting other Twain scholars, but from attempts to reach the audience (high school children and anti-racists) who will not grant access to the book or pick it up themselves because of its offensive content.

""When the younger reader is staring at that word five times on a given page and the instructor is saying, 'Mark Twain didn't mean this and you have to read it with an appreciation of irony,' you're asking a lot of a younger reader," Gribben says."

I have so much to say about this, such as is it at the teacher or the school board's discretion to make this required reading for high schoolers? Are students this age mature enough to handle the satirical implications and historical references behind the "n" word? I don't even know where to begin.

The head of the Office for Intellectual Freedom hits the nail on the head with how I feel about this action:

"The book without that word is not Huckleberry Finn," says Jones, head of the library association's Office for Intellectual Freedom. Twain "put it there because he wanted people to struggle with it. I think, as a country, we're big enough to struggle with it."

The point I wish  to make about actions like this is this:  scholars can call it whatever they want, they can make up 100 reasons why removing original material from a novel in order to "help it go down easier" or "make it more accessible to younger readers" is an appropriate course of action, but I'm going to come out and say what's really going on here:

That is all.