It’s not that it’s very bad, it’s just that I was fifty-odd pages in and couldn’t help constantly listing all the other books I would like to be reading instead. Ever got that feeling?

(At least up to the point where I gave up) the text is very much the one from the original P&P, only England is in the midst of a strange plague that turns people into zombies. To survive, men and women have to become experts in combat. The Bennett family gave preference to the ninja arts and Mr. Bennett even took the girls to the East for training.

The problem here is that Grahame-Smith decided not to change the storyline, but just inserted zombies and battles once in a while. I think he picked up the text, a highlighter in hand, and stated to choose the parts where he could insert an attack (walks to Meryton, end of the Assembly Ball) or a reference to e.g. katanas and Shaolin masters. It felt too artificial.

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to be more ruthless about dropping a book that’s not working for me. It will still look nice  in my dedicated Jane Austen shelves, but I’ll wait for the movie with Nathalie Portman (!!).  I’ll have to choose a replacement for the RIP Challenge eventually, but right now I’m happily moving on to Parrot and Olivier in America.

PS: An afterthought – although the concept didn’t bother me (and in many ways I’m an Austen purist), one thing did: the women’s dresses in the illustrations seem to vary from the 18th century all the way up to the Industrial Revolution. How about some research Mr Smiley?

GNRT