Reviews with content warning for Violence - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

This book was a clever idea but not very well executed. At first it was amusing how little adding the zombies to the book changed the story. But further on, it just seemed like lazy writing. The whole story was the same with the inclusion of a few zombies and changing some lines. The only thing the author seemed to change was the characters personalities. Elizabeth is represented as a great warrior who is unnecessarily cruel to the zombies. Darcy is not the awkward person we see in P&P but is also a cruel person. In P&P there was a lot of nuance with people emotions. Jane Austen didn’t need to spell out what characters were feeling in order for readers to understand but in P&P&Z the author spells out a lot of the emotions. This was an unnecessary inclusion.
Additionally there was a lot of unnecessary violence in this book. There was a lot of beating of characters that was never expounded upon and seemed to be thrown in just because it was a zombie novel and so there must be violence. Overall I wish the zombies added more to the storyline and that the characters were represented better. There also didn’t need to be as much violence apart from the zombies.

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emtees's review against another edition

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adventurous funny lighthearted fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

I wanted to like this book because the premise is really clever and funny. If I had to pick a quiet piece of classic literature that would benefit from the inclusion of horror monsters and fight scenes, it would be Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennet is the perfect classic heroine for this story, which comes across well in the book - she’s got a bit of savagery to her that this twisted version of her story brings out. And if the author had chosen to cut the original novel down to a novella and insert the zombie storyline into it, I think it would have worked very well. There are so many moments that are really striking and funny: the Bennet sisters falling into fighting formation when a ball is overrun by “unmentionables,” the prolonged bit where a major character from the original story is turning into a zombie and the manners-obsessed society around her doesn’t seem to notice, the big wuxia-style fight scene at the end between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine. I also really liked the fictional sermon inserted at the end of the book, where a priest attempts to explain why the English are so suited for dealing with a hoard of zombies overcoming their country: “who but the English could suffer this plight with so complete an absence of hysteria or emotion whatsoever?” The fake set of questions for the reader, imitating the kinds of book club type questions found at the back of reissues of classic novels, was also funny.

But the concept of the book isn’t really enough to sustain a whole novel, and all the ways the author tries to get around that problem don’t work. There are whole chapters that are just Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with some find-and-replace dialogue, subbing in references to training in the “deadly arts” in place of music lessons or randomly adding a line about the joys of the warrior lifestyle into a familiar scene. There are moments where it feels like the author is actually trying for some real fantasy world building - the scene where Elizabeth surveys a church full of zombie victims, or the bits that deal with the way the Bennet sisters were shaped by their warrior training, are strangely sincere - but they sit awkwardly alongside a bizarre scene where Elizabeth rips a man’s heart out of his chest for no reason or constant references to ninjas. (The thing where all the characters are trained in Asia to fight and are obsessed with a really superficial idea of Japanese and Chinese culture is never clearly explained or excused. Why does Darcy’s housekeeper have bound feet?) There are plotlines that should have been cut because the experiment falls apart when you get to a storyline where everyone worries that a warrior-trained zombie fighting woman might have her virtue besmirched. And worst of all, there’s the gross, sophomoric humor that has nothing to do with zombies that keeps being thrown in, like the author needed to make sure you understood that this book was not actually written by literary icon Jane Austen. I could get past weird stuff like Elizabeth’s father sleeping with Chinese prostitutes or the constant unnecessary references to vomit, but then there was the prolonged bit at the end where

Wickham becomes a quadriplegic and this is not only played for laughs, but we get endless references to him having bowel movements and Lydia being forced to clean them up, which we are assured is what they deserve, because I guess disability and caretaking is a funny bit.

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maddness22's review

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dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

I really wanted to enjoy this. However, the only enjoyable parts of the novel were the ones untouched by the new author. There was very little cohesion between the zombie sections and the original narrative. There was also very little respect for the original characters. The ninja part was out of left field and didn't belong in the tale except to serve as a shock factor. In fact, most of this book is mostly dependent on shock factor moments. It's also incredibly gross and not meant for the weak of stomach.

I think this would be very fun for casual readers who have trouble getting into classics, but it felt incredibly disrespectful to the original story for me to truly get into it.

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nutm3g's review

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adventurous funny fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

I read this for a book club and had high hopes for it since I enjoyed the original novel as well as the film adaption of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. This is one of those rare cases where the movie is far better than the book, which hurts me to say. While I know this is a comedic horror retelling of a classic, I assumed the characters' motives and beliefs would stay in line with that of the original, but it really strayed in that aspect. There were a lot of things that occurred that left you thinking "what?" with little to no explanation. The zombies almost seemed haphazardly slapped into the story at times, and the fight scenes were brief with little to no action or believability (which to be fair the book is comedy centric). The several mentions of self-harm ("atonement" in the book) and casualness in which a suicide is brushed over left me feeling uneasy. If asked, I would not recommend this book to anyone and instead tell them to stick to the movie.

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grace17's review against another edition

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adventurous funny lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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fatkidatheartreads's review

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funny slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No

2.5

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thecasualbooknerd's review against another edition

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Though I enjoyed the Bennet sisters being legendary warriors, I could not deal with the fat-shaming anymore.

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