Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors

Give me a good Jane Austen retelling any day! Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors is inspired by - you guessed it - Pride and Prejudice. Sonali Dev does a delightful job taking inspiration from the classic while also making the story her own. In the novel, Darcy James “DJ” Caine is a working class chef who dropped everything and moved to California to support his sister Emma, who has a brain tumor. Trisha Raje is Emma's surgeon and part of the family employing DJ as a caterer. Their first encounter in the kitchen of the Raje estate leaves both with an unfavorable impression of the other, which only worsens in subsequent encounters. When the two are forced to work together on an event, Trisha begins to be irresistibly drawn to DJ despite the animosity between them.

While it doesn't take much for me to enjoy stories inspired by Austen, I particularly enjoyed this one. I love how Dev reworked the characters (including gender flipping!) while still leaving them recognizable and also without feeling the need to reproduce every person from the original book. Everyone feels so real and relatable, and getting both Trisha's and DJ's perspectives help the reader clearly see how easily we can misunderstand and wrongly judge people when we don't know them. You don't have to be an Austen fan to enjoy this fun, sweet, romantic novel!