“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. But it’s not just the junky stuff they’ll get rid of. People can be thrown away too, like last night’s trash left out on sidewalks or pushed to the edge of wherever all broken things go. What those rich people don’t always know is that broken and forgotten neighborhoods were first built out of love.”
Pride is retelling of Pride and Prejudice in a contemporary setting. Pride and Prejudice is one of my favorite classics and I am quite picky about how the retellings are. The book itself says that it’s a “remix” not a “retelling”. This book is about our main character Zuri Benitz, her many sisters, and the two handsome boys who just moved in next door. The Darcys’ are a rich black family who have two very handsome boys, Ainsley and Darius. Now straight off the bat, I didn’t really like how the two main love interests (Bingley and Darcy) were related because it cut a lot of characters out of the story. Mostly Bingley’s older sisters. I’m actually really disappointed that I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I wanted to.
Since Pride and Prejudice is one of my favorites, I had really high expectations for this book. But I think if you just forgot the fact that it’s trying to be a remix of the classic novel and let it stand on it’s own, it’s quite good. But I can’t get over the fact that it doesn’t really work very well since in the end of Pride and Prejudice everyone gets married cause it’s the 1800s. Our cast of characters were pretty bland. Especially Ainsley and Janae. They were barely in the book and there were so few moments of seeing the pure love that the couple were supposed to share. Zuri was the only character that had any kind of development in the book, and it was barely there. Darius’s character development was not there at all, it just instantly happened. We just didn’t get the depth and description that we got in the original novel. The romance wasn’t as intriguing and I’m just overall disappointed. In this novel, since we are in 2018, no one gets married immediately! Cause that would be kind of weird.
Overall, I gave this book 3 stars out of 5. It’s not a bad book, I did enjoy it but not as a Pride and Prejudice retelling.
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