So thanks to all my fellow Cannonballers Eligible popped up on my radar. I hadn’t heard about the Austen Project, but if I’d had it isn’t really my thing. I’m a huge Austenite (minus Mansfield Park because… ugh), but I don’t do messing with her very well. I don’t do the “sequels” or the re-imaginings easily (except Clueless which is one of the most perfect movies ever made). I haven’t even seen the Joe Wright version of P&P, because it’s Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth […]
When The End of the World Comes, I Want to Be in Cincinnati
I know people have mixed feelings about this reboot of Pride and Prejudice but I heartily enjoyed it, and I think Jane Austen would have too. Though I never was fully able to forget this was an homage, Sittenfeld does a good job of playing with how the dynamics of Austen’s insular novel world would translate to a 21st century American context. Austen was poking sly fun at her characters, and Sittenfeld does likewise. Instead of being set in the English countryside, this novel is set […]
There’s nothing like summer in the city, someone under stress meets someone looking pretty
It is a truth universally acknowledged that I will devour any Pride & Prejudice adaptation as quickly as possible. And Eligible proved to be no different. This is the second modernized version of Pride & Prejudice that I’ve read (the first being Bridget Jones’s Diary, of course), and the third that I’ve, I don’t know, CONSUMED if you include the very excellent Lizzie Bennet Diaries. (And why wouldn’t you?) This version has updated our favorite characters for modern times, and provided them with new challenges, […]
Just like Jane Austen, but with reality TV, Cross Fit, anorexia, and tons of premarital sex.
Eligible is not a 5-star piece of literature. But I enjoyed the hell out of it. I could not put this sucker down. I’m sort of sad that I’m now caught up with all of the books thus far written for The Austen Project (see my previous reviews of Emma: A Modern Retelling, Northanger Abbey, and Sense & Sensibility) and this one is by far my favorite. Liz Bennet is in her late 30’s, living as a magazine editor in New York City, having an affair with the […]