aOkay so I feel like I have to skirt a very fine line here. The reason this book is successful is that it is very serious about its nature as a remix. It takes a lot of elements and jettisons a number more and then plays around with it to make a story with...what if I had a Darcy of my own vibes and it's so much better than if it tried to be a faithful adaptation. (I tend to be harsher on faithful adaptations.) I struggled a little with the aging down of the characters (Lizzy was 20 and Oliver is 17, Austen!Darcy was 28 and Ardent!Darcy is...18 or 19? Somewhere in that range.) Just because of the part of my brain yelling "everyone here is TWO!" which just kicks in some times. The burden of having gone from reading P&P first when I was not yet 1 and 20 (I was 12) to having my child be closer to Lizzy's age than I am.

Two things it got absolutely right and upon which I judge all of my P&P adaptations:
1) Darcy is not cruel. He is socially awkward, bad at people, used to being used, and judgmental of others but he never sets out to be unkind. The arc of his relationship in the original is him seeing his behavior through her eyes and her seeing his behavior through his and both going "ohhhh, okay." Novoa absolutely got that here and his use of Oliver as himself and Oliver pretending to capture that part of Darcy's personality was incredibly well done.
2) The Lydia problem. Novoa more or less ignores the three younger Bennets entirely, which works out great. Basically, the Lydia problem is that Wickham can't end up with Lydia is he's *the worst* so either he needs to be less bad or they need to not end up together. Novoa takes the most liberties with the story around Wickham, so that all works out and no one is punished for being 16 and naive by being married to an awful human. 

The thing I find super interesting is that Oliver is no longer the prejudiced one, but the victim of prejudice. Which is what immediately makes Wickham stand out to him as evil; Oliver has a very fine-tuned sense of who would cause him pain and that makes it much harder to make him Wickham's dupe (and also I don't think that's the story Novoa wants to tell). So the story transmutes to move Wickham away from the younger Bennets and to make Oliver much more a victim of circumstances who must choose agency rather than an agent who chooses wrongly and must learn. It's also the hardest part of P&P - to make both Lizzy and Darcy sympathetic - and it's the part that Novoa, understandably, is least interested in.

 

I have one ongoing, main complaint with this book and it's that Austen's language is so elegant and delightful and whenever people rewrite her prose, my brain goes "but it doesn't *sound* like that". No one does sound like her, not really. And I don't think Novoa is trying; he's very deliberately remixing by taking elements of the story and playing with them to create something new and exactly right.