Pride

Whew, excellent top to bottom. It's a MUST listen from Elizabeth Acevedo, it's like Zoboi wrote Zuri with her specifically in mind. This update to Pride & Prejudice lived and breathed and loved and was joyful and real, with gentrification as a necessary central plot point. This would be a great lit circle/book group/class read selection.

I have very mixed feelings about this one. I've read several retellings of Pride & Prejudice, but I think this is the first one that aged the characters down to teenagers. And I don't think it works as well. In both The Lizzie Bennett Diaries and Unmarriageable, the main character and her older sister were in their twenties. They were still living at home, but they were graduating college, starting careers - a completely different stage of their lives from the characters in Pride. In Pride, Zuri is a senior in high school and Janae, her older sister, is home after her first year of college. Which makes their younger sister, Layla, thirteen. And if you know the plot of Pride & Prejudice, you know why that squicks me a little bit. (Zoboi did change that plot point slightly so it's not quite as bad as it could be, but still. Ew.) This is a good example of what should be a New Adult story feeling forced into a Young Adult mold.

Age issues aside, I really liked the other changes made in this retelling; class differences are alive and well in the modern day, and I especially liked how it addressed neighborhood gentrification. Because yes, improving neighborhoods is a worthy goal; but when it raises rent without raising the income of the people living there, it forces people out who have lived in the neighborhood their entire lives. Gentrification is classist and, because our class system is racist, racist.

I enjoyed the Afro-Latino racial change; just like Unmarriageable's Pakistani setting, it brings a new cultural wrapping to the plot, and adds racial tension to the lessons on class that the story usually tells.

The book skims over a lot of the normal Pride & Prejudice plot, which I rather expected for a Young Adult book. Unmarriageable was much better in that regard, but Pride is still very enjoyable. It's definitely a worthy addition to the Pride & Prejudice....pantheon? Shelf? Canon? I do think it would have been much better as a New Adult story, though. I'm still stuck on that.

You can find all my reviews and more at Goddess in the Stacks.

Book 10 complete for O.W.L.'s 2019 Ancient Runes- Retelling

Pros:
- I went into this with limited expectations and limited knowledge about the book and I was pleasantly surprised. This book was excellent, I immediately fell in love with the characters and connected with their stories. I want to see how Darius and Zuri came together and I wanted to see how they handled their “differences”
- This is a retelling of Pride and Prejudice but it was subtle, other than the first line which is almost identical to how Pride and Prejudice opens. But I appreciated that while it was a retelling it is a loose one and it still it's own story. Zuri and Darius were their own characters and they had their own story to tell.
- I also loved getting to see Zuri's poems and spoken word throughout the story. It made her writing more real and added an extra touch to the story.

Cons:
- I feel like this book was rushed and could have been longer. It was under 300 pages and while I was able to read it in a single day, I wish there was more. I feel like there could have been more events we got to see or more explanation of certain things. I just wanted more.