Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors

This is yet another Pride and Prejudice retelling, as evidenced by the title. It seems to be a popular thing to do of late, but they've all been very good, so I'm not complaining! This one, more than the others, really deconstructed the story and put it all back together in a unique way.

Probably the biggest change here is that while Darcy is still a man with a younger sister and no other family, the roles of the two families have been switched. Darcy is the poor one, and Trisha (Lizzie Bennett) is the rich one. Wickham still plays the villain, though in a slightly different manner, and Darcy is not the friend of Trisha/Lizzie's elder sister's beau. (Though the elder sister does still have romantic problems!)

I really liked the swapped roles; it made for a radically different plotline than the story it's based on. What I did not like is the lack of sparks between DJ/Darcy and Trisha. They butted heads like they should, but unlike the original and most of the retellings, I didn't feel the underlying sexual tension. Trisha seemed more enamored of DJ's cooking than of DJ, and I don't know what DJ saw in Trisha at ALL.

The author also kept pulling me out of my immersion in the story with her repeated use of “XXXX” was what I WANTED to say, but of course I didn't say it, instead I simply replied “YYYY.” Just - over and over, with multiple characters. I appreciate you're trying to show us what they're thinking vs. what they're saying, but change it up.

I did enjoy the book overall; I love seeing other cultures take on this trope, from the Pakistani Unmarriageable to the Brooklyn African-American Pride, to this mix of Indian-American and British-Indian. I think Unmarriageable was my favorite of these three, but it really was excellent.

So this was good, but not outstanding.

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

At first, I couldn't get over the really traumatic things that are part of the backstories of the characters in Sonali Dev's Jane Austen retellings. I still think that the ones in A Recipe for Persuasion are not handled very well. But in Dev's bio, it says she writes “Bollywood-style love stories,” and I feel like thinking of them through that filter helped me. Still, if you have any sensitivity around sexual assault and domestic abuse, use caution. (It's all off the page and in backstory, but several of the characters are dealing with the trauma in present day.) All that to say, I do really like the Raje family at the center of this series, and I think Dev does a good job of capturing the heart of the original novels in these modernized versions. One thing that confused me a bit here is that she gender-flipped the Darcy-Elizabeth roles, but then mixed around some of the story elements. (For example, the male lead, DJ, is the Elizabeth equivalent, but then he has a close younger sister, who would be Georgiana. A little confusing.)