2.5 stars

Pride and Prejudice and Mistletoe is a modernised retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with not only a Christmas twist but a gender-swapped one too. The story focuses on Darcy Fitzwilliam’s return home to Ohio after a period of eight Christmases away from home. At her family Christmas party she reconnects with Luke Bennett and sparks fly. But the pair have a lot of issues to resolve before anything can happen.

I’ve never read a book more where I would have liked dual POV’s than this one. The entire story is told in Darcy’s POV and we don’t get Luke’s voice whatsoever and i really would have liked his point of view of things. I actually feel like, as a reader, I didn’t get a feel of Luke at all or what type of person he was (being a male ‘version’ of Elizabeth Bennett was not enough if you ask me). We don’t even get a lot of real conversations between Darcy and Luke - she makes out with him twice and then decides that she’s in love with him (mmm,okay).

I did like that Bingley was gay but I do think there were some cliche, stereotypical ‘gay best friend’ scenes such as the hat and scarf dance party thing they had at one point. Also I love and hate how they fell into being best friends when Darcy hadn’t talked to him for eight years.

I also wasn’t mad about the fact that Luke and Darcy both ended up being engaged to two different people in the book, in the course of less than a week and broke up with them in the same amount of time. Just yeah….no.

I feel like this had a lot of potential and I did like some elements of it (Darcy being a powerful, ass-kicking woman in the business world for one) but it fell short on so much more. It depended too much on being a P&P retelling and it needed a lot more to make the characters lovable.