Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith (4/5 stars)

This book is exactly what the title suggests. Some parts of the book are intact and then zombie scenes thrown in. Much of the dialog is also changed to incorporate that Britain has been overrun by zombies for the last 50 years or so.

The good stuff about this book is that parts are hilarious. The pictures in the book are also very hilarious. Sometimes I was chuckling loudly at the craziness of the whole thing. Somehow Grahame-Smith managed to do zombies in a very Victorian way. It is awesome that there are now fight scenes and zombies and ninjas! Yes, I said ninjas. The ninjas and the Bennet's combat training sometimes give the book a bit of a kungfu taste at points. So I liked that too.

Now for the bad stuff. I found the beginning of the book, with zombies, to be just as long and tedious to get through as it was without zombies. Also, since I already knew what happened in the end (kind of) the story just wasn't as interresting the second time through. I also have a stylistic quip. A big part of what makes "Pride and Prejudice" awesome is how all the characters use their subtle wording as weapons. Well, a lot of that is lost when instead of being clever about how something is said, Lizzie whips out her katana and slices her "enemies" head off. I mean it is funny but the story looses a lot of it's intelligence too...if you know what I mean.

Overall this was an okay book; it gets an extra star just for being a very novel and interesting idea. I would read it mostly if you like zombies and you like "Pride and Prejudice". If you don't like one or the other very much I think you will have trouble getting through it.

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