Pride

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.

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.

Esperava mais da história, mas achei que foi uma inspiração bem jovem com umas pegadas de questionamentos sobre classes sociais meio sem filtro da protagonista kkk achei muito vai e volta em determinados momentos com os relacionamentos, e nem seria um problema caso o livro tivesse umas 200 páginas a mais pra poder espalhar mais esses fatos. Fora isso, os personagens secundários (a família de Zuri, a protagonista) são ótimos, em alguns momentos dei sonoras gargalhadas com as irmãs mais novas dela. Por outro lado, a tentativa de abordar muitos outros temas na mesma história foi interessante, apesar de deixar o leitor querendo saber um pouquinho mais sobre eles, que foram só pincelados e não consegui criar muita conexão com cenas que teoricamente poderiam impactar mais/gerar mais conexão.

This book sounds amazing. It isn't. I am so disappointed I want to cry.

I was promised “smart, funny, gorgeous retelling of the classic”, and what I get is stupid and a lot of tropes. I think I giggled a couple of times, but most of the time I was disgusted by the MC.

Frankly, none of the characters was good. I think Madrina and papi were my favorites.

Anyway, what's good about it?
The cover is absolutely gorgeous.
I like the neighborhood pride and gentification part of it. It just didn't sound quite real, though, as if the author didn't come from Brooklyn.
I like the poetry writing part of the MC. (Not so much the actual poetry, but I like how it was woven in)


I hate the MC.
She is supposed to be this tough, smart chick, and she's dumb, egocentric, conceited little bitch.
She's supposed to love books and reading and she isn't ever caught reading anything.
She whines all the time about how disrespectful people are to her, how bad manners everyone else has, how embarrassed she is because of her family, and she is horrible herself. She's scowling most of the time, is only concerned if people disrespect her and her neighborhood, doesn't bother finding out, just assumes and judges people all the time.
I think she apologized once in the whole book.
She lies all the time.
She is judgmental and prejudiced, and doesn't ever apologize for having preconceived negative notions and treating people accordingly. Her excuse for it is “I thought you were prejudiced, too!” Thought. He wasn't.
She falls for a guy, because he's hot, has swag and has the same background as she does. And isn't the main love interest. Because he's rich and wasn't all congeniality, even though considering how she treated his brother who was all congeniality, I don't think it would have mattered at all.
The first guy tells her a story, and she buys it, hook, line and sinker, and then the other guy tells her a story and she buys it, too, hook, line and sinker. No questions asked. No explanations listened to. And she is supposed to be this smart girl.
A lot of “tell, not show”. Characters aren't this author's strong point.

Summary: A retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in modern Brooklyn.

Retellings or reimagining of classic stories is a staple, both for author development and for mining stories for new insights.

Pride by Ibi Zobi, author of American Street, is retelling Pride and Prejudice, a book I have only read once, five years ago. This version opens with a riff off of the classic opening:

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.