Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I LOVE Jane Austen, PARTICULARLY Pride and Prejudice, so I was excited at the prospect of a good sequel. Was I in for a suprise. Reading through it, there were parts that I had to put the book down and just laugh my head off. A few examples of what set me off: When Lydia is trying to warn her sisters concerning the evils of intercourse, she says to Jane: "...if you allow Mr. Bingley to kiss you too ardently, he will be aroused to such lust his loins will ache and his engorged lance will burst from his nether garments to ravish you! Wickham's waggled at me more than once!" Another example: When Elizabeth was trying to decide how to tell Darcy about her monthly, she thought of saying, "Sorry my dear, we cannot make the beast with two backs for I am riding the red stallion." I mean...come on. Once I stopped laughing, I started becoming offended. Not at the sex, although it was raunchy, ridiculous, and ubiquitous, but more at the way she portrayed the characters. I suppose that if you were not a fan of the original, it would not be as insulting, but having fallen in love with Austen's complex, realistic, and honorable characters, it was humiliating to watch Berdoll turn them into typical romance-nonsense characters obsessed with sex. Elizabeth was changed from a strong, confident, intelligent woman into a weak and pathetic doll who follows her husband's every command. Plus she says and does things that she certainly never would in the original story. And Bingley, Bingley of all men has an illicit-love child. Furthermore, the writing itself was MONSTROUS. I think she tried to mimic the writing style of Austen's period, but the result was a miserable failure. The sentences were filled with extra words and phrases, none of which made the slightest bit of sense, and period phrases were mixed in with modern slang. Berdoll has forever destroyed the words "heretofore", "hence", "subsequent", and "therefore" for me by using them improperly AND in every other sentence, and if I never hear the word "howbeit" again, it'll be too soon. I think she was under the impression that it's a direct synonym for "although", and it's definitely not. I only managed to read 1/3 of the book, and then just skimmed through parts of the rest, but I think that I can safely say this ranks high in my top ten list of "The Worst Books EVER". DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME!!