Eligible

by Curtis Sittenfeld

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Amazon | Goodreads

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Eligible is 488 pages long, and yet there are 181 Chapters?!?! That means the average chapter length is less than 3 pages long.  There were chapters that were literally one paragraph long. Why would Sittenfeld do this?!?! This drove me nuts waaaay more than it should have!  But there was no need for it!

I could have overlooked the abnormally short chapters if the book was amazing, but I thought it was just ok.  I had heard so many good things about it, so maybe part of the problem was that I went in with too high of expectations? It is a Pride and Prejudice re-telling, and I LOVE P&P re-tellings, but this one just fell short in my opinion.

Most of the character names were unchanged, so it was weird the ones they did.  Why was Charles Bingley changed to Chip when Elizabeth, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Jane, Mary, Kitty, Lydia, and Charlotte all kept their original names? I guess Elizabeth was called Liz and not Lizzy, but her full name was used too.  It just felt weird that some names were changed and others weren’t.  It should have been all or nothing.

Also I didn’t really like most of the characters.  The only ones I really liked were Darcy, Jane, and Ham.  Its hard for me to like a Pride and Prejudice re-telling when I don’t even like Elizabeth!!! In the beginning she was kind of mean and at the end she just annoyed me.  There was a sweet spot in the middle where she didn’t bug me and I got sucked in, but it wasn’t enough.

Also the plot was kind of thin.  They were supposed to be “high society” type people but that seemed very inconsistent.  I don’t know much about high society except what I have read in books, but in Eligible it was kind of all over the place.  I don’t really know how to explain it, but it didn’t feel real.  Plus, the whole idea of the TV show “Eligible” making Chip famous was weird.  Do people really recognize the participants in the real show “The Bachelor”?  I have never watched it but I just don’t think those people become real celebrities? (maybe I’m wrong?)  Either way, I appreciate the attempt to bring P&P into the 21st century, but it kind of failed.

I did get sucked in and read well past my bedtime the first night.  (I finished the book in two days) and I did enjoy some parts in the middle. But once I was done I felts just “meh” about it.