Monday, February 8, 2016

Book Review 2016: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

**All reviews on Randomness With Rachel are done on a five-star rating system. The reviews are solely my opinion and no one else's. Randomness With Rachel does not receive any incentives or compensations for reviews.**

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith


Let me say this first: I wanted to like this book, I REALLY did, but it just didn't do anything for me. I have never read the original Pride and Prejudice, so I honestly can't compare the two. The only version of Pride and Prejudice that I have ever watched was on the TV show Wishbone (click here for that video). Maybe if I was more familiar with the original story, I would have at least found this book humorous.

First of all, he should have called this book Pride and Prejudice and Ninja Training with some Zombies. There was a lot of ninja talk. More ninjas than zombies actually. I didn't realize that being a trained ninja was a prerequisite for killing zombies. But, I'm no zombie-killing expert. The zombie parts weren't THAT bad (even though the word zombie rarely appeared), but the rest of the story line just seemed a little boring to me. I felt like I was back in school forcing myself to read a book for class and I had no interest in it.

I didn't really like ANY of the Bennet sisters. Lydia probably annoyed me the most. I kept hoping she would be the victim of a zombie attack. Even Elizabeth (the heroine of the story) didn't appeal to me that much. I've read in other reviews of this book that her character was changed from the original story (besides her being a ninja-trained zombie killer) so even people who loved her in the original story didn't like her in this one. But yeah, I definitely wasn't cheering for her at any point in this book.

Mrs. Bennet had a "Kris Jenner" attitude going for her (thank you to my friend Cara for giving me that analogy). She annoyed me more than Lydia. She just seemed nasty to her family and made her daughters seem worthless that they weren't married.

Mr. Darcy seemed like the biggest jerk* ever. The story between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy made me think of all the bad teen TV shows and movies where you know two people are going to end up together, but you HATE the idea of it. If I were to do a top ten list of the biggest jerks* in literature, he would make the list. Again, I don't know if his personality was changed for this version or not. So my apologies to Ms. Austen if he's a nicer guy in her book. But in this one, I just didn't like him.

I don't know if I could recommend this book or not. It's gonna have to be your call if you want to sit through it. I personally will never read it again. I will see the movie though (because that is the only reason I read the book in the first place). Maybe this will be one of those few instances where the movie is better than the book.

*I really wanted to use a word other than "jerk", but my mother might read this review

XOXO!

1 comment:

  1. I've been toying with the idea of reading this as well. I've never read the original or even watched any movies based on it. Just not my cup of tea, apparently. The only thing that got my interest was the idea of zombies but if there isn't much of them, what's the point, right?! So, maybe I'll put this one off to read & just watch the movie when it comes out on video. Ha!

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