3.5 stars. At this point, my expectations for Jane Austen retellings are so very very low. There are about 2 that I can think of that I would recommend to anyone and considering I’ve read plenty? That’s not a great batting average. It’s like authors/publishers know fans will pick them up so they don’t feel like they have to try very hard. People LOVE Lizzie & Darcy so of course they’ll read. But in truth, you’re getting compared to one of the best writers of […]
CBR Bingo (8 and 9) This Old Thing
If “This Old Thing” hadn’t been a square on Bingo this year I could have easily gone my whole life without reading any Jane Austen, and I still haven’t seen any of her film adaptions. I read a lot of classic American literature in high school and college, including Great Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, several Steinbeck novels, The Scarlet Letter and even Moby Dick but I don’t think I was ever assigned anything from the other side of the pond while a student. I picked Pride and Prejudice because it seemed […]
“It’s a truth universally acknowledged that when rich people move into the hood, where it’s a little bit broken and a little bit forgotten, the first thing they want to do is clean it up.”
I like that Ibi Zoboi didn’t call this a “retelling” of Pride and Prejudice. She’s going with the term “remix.” That seems to fit a little better, because while the main plot is pretty similar, there are lots of little things that don’t quite fit into a strict retelling. What Zoboi did instead was take a story that most of us already know, flip parts of it around, and make it her own. And it really worked for me. Zuri Benitez was born and raised […]
Every book is a different hood, a different country, a different world.
Ibi Zoboi’s Pride is a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in Brooklyn. The best adaptations take a familiar story and use it to explore contemporary issues. Once we identify each new character with it’s P&P counterpart, we understand where they fit in the story and then we can move on to the meat of it. We know class is going to be a part of the conflict, and since this is a modernization, we know getting the 5 Benitez sisters married off isn’t a motivation.