Reviews with content warning for Antisemitism - Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride and Prejudice

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Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride and Prejudice by Curtis Sittenfeld

10 reviews

dracula_but_slay's review against another edition

funny lighthearted medium-paced

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

1.0

Absolutely no hate to people who love romcoms. I’m sure most of them are good! I actually quite enjoy the original Pride and Prejudice, which is essentially the mother of all modern romcoms. Eligible, however, was quite possibly the worst reading experience I’ve ever had 🩷 I’m absolutely gobsmacked at how you can possibly fumble an adaptation of such a beloved classic this hard. Honestly, it’s kind of impressive. None of the characters felt like the originals in any way whatsoever. They’re all insufferable jerks who think they’re better than everyone else — and that’s not including if they’re also racist, homophobic, fatphobic, antisemitic, AND transphobic?!?!?? Yes, those are all very real qualities given to some of these characters (Mrs. Bennet being the most egregious example who quite literally is every type of -phobic and -ist the author could possibly think of). Is any meaningful commentary given on ANY of these issues? Ha, no. If you’re lucky Elizabeth will spout some smart comment condemning a thing, but it basically just amounts to “racism is bad 🤩” (or whatever equivalent for the topic at hand). Elizabeth herself probably suffered the most at the hands of the author. She is SO insufferable. She thinks she’s better than everyone yet constantly needs to tie herself to some man — including a married man! Yes, the beloved Elizabeth Bennet is a home wrecker!!!! Classy!!!! And if the man — married or otherwise — doesn’t work out, boy can you count on some strong self-pity that just NEVER ends and is overall miserable to read. As for the plot, if this wasn’t an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, I think I’d be totally lost. There are so many barely related tangents in this almost 500 page book it’s difficult to keep track of what’s happening. At one point the plot is literally “oh no the house has spiders and we can’t sell the house if it has spiders so we gotta kill the spiders but oh no people don’t wanna buy houses with spiders so we didn’t sell the house but we killed the spiders yay!” No I am not joking. The sheer amount of useless 1-2 page chapters probably doesn’t help. I don’t think an editor was consulted for this book and it shows. This also causes characters to be left out for large chunks of the story. I forgot BINGLEY, one of the MAIN LOVE INTERESTS, was a character until like the last 100 pages of the book. Also Charlotte and Mr. Collins are never heard from again after Elizabeth visits them. Basically, if the characters aren’t immediately important to the plot, you can just forget about them. Chances are high you won’t see them again (sorry to you Charlotte Lucas stans out there). Even the TITLE OF THE BOOK doesn’t have as much relevance as you’d think it would. The fictional reality show that is the book’s namesake comes up in the beginning and the end. It maybe takes up 200 pages of the book at most (although granted, I consider that a blessing given the hot mess that is Jane and Bingley’s wedding which yes, we do get to see. No, it is not very enjoyable). All of this, combined with the bizarre timeline that I can’t quite grasp, makes Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship at the end of the novel feel totally unearned. I swear we get what occurred in the original over a year in the span of like a month. Although again, I’m not quite sure! The timeline in this book is very confusing because of all its tangents! But whatever the timeline is, it felt way too short for the large amount of character development Darcy and Elizabeth go through. This is not helped by the fact Darcy and Elizabeth have sex SEVERAL TIMES quite early in the book???????? Way to dash a lot of the romantic tension there. The author must have been aware of that because Darcy conveniently disappears from the story soon enough. I think I can best articulate how horrible this book was by drawing your attention to its final chapter: the final chapter of this slowburn romance, focusing on a beloved literary couple….. FOCUSES ON MARY BENNET AND NOT THE COUPLE. SPECIFICALLY MARY AND HER LOVE FOR BOWLING????????? YES, THAT IS A THING. I genuinely had nothing to say when I saw THAT was how this whole story ended, and I think it sums up the experience well: Eligible is not really about the romance between Darcy and Elizabeth or even Bingley and Jane. It sees itself as a commentary on current societal issues, especially involving women, but its commentary amounts to nothing. It offers nothing new; it doesn’t even offer any potential solutions. To Elgible, if you’re a woman, either find a man who treats you right or go bowl or something. You can’t have both. And if you’re part of another marginalized group? Uhhh I don’t know, explain that you just have a birth defect or something and that’s why society treats you badly. YEAH, DON’T THINK I’M IGNORING THAT. The treatment of the one trans character is one of the worst things I have EVER seen. The birth defect argument is a GENUINE attempt to explain transness and it just… does NOT work. Once you find out he’s trans all the characters and the book itself treat him like a freaking zoo animal. It’s disgusting. His transness is also supposed to be the equivalent of Wickham’s big scandal in the original?! Which, for a book claiming to be so progressive, is a HORRIBLE way to portray transgender people. They also included a slur for trans people because why not! Yes, there’s an actual slur in this book on top of everything else!! But even the removal of this slur or other problematic commentary would not fix this book. It is fundamentally flawed at its core. The moment you twisted these beloved characters to be unrecognizable, you failed to make a good adaptation. I believe in the conspiracy theory that this author wrote a subpar romcom and reskinned it to appeal to the Austen girlies. While this might work for some, it does NOT work for me. You can enjoy this book all you want, but I personally never want to even touch it ever again.

Content Warnings

theelizart's review against another edition

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Antisemitism homophobia etc and was told it gets graphically transphobic as well.

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alireads's review against another edition

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funny lighthearted slow-paced

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

3.5

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danidimuzio's review against another edition

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emotional lighthearted medium-paced

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

3.0

This book left a very weird taste in my mouth. Difficult to know if some of the offensive content would have been offensive 10 years ago or would have been written today. The characters are significantly less likable than Austen’s originals, and Darcy’s capitulation in particular, though inevitable, still felt random and unexplained.

It’s fine as a cheesy romance novel but I don’t think it reflects kindly on the source material and the way race and gender are discussed do make me think I’d have been better off not reading it.

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k_toch's review against another edition

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relaxing 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

4.5

One of my favorite adaptations of Pride and Prejudice I've read -- I felt like I really knew each of the Bennetts and could see how they exist in modern society. And some of the changes that were made to the plot were surprising in a good way -- it really felt like experiencing something new. I was a tad disappointed with the ending, though.

Liz proposing to Darcy when they haven't even dated yet? That just didn't feel believable to me.

But overall I really enjoyed and would recommend.

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smolbeez's review against another edition

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emotional funny lighthearted fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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skudiklier's review against another edition

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emotional lighthearted reflective medium-paced

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

4.0

I'm really not sure how I feel about this book. On one hand, I enjoyed reading it, and was very invested in what was going to happen. I wasn't at all bored by it because I knew how Pride and Prejudice goes, or anything like that.

On the other hand, for the first third of the book I hated all of the characters, and I still don't really like most of them by the end. There's a lot of transphobia, fatphobia, racism, and homophobia. Some of these are very clearly faults of the characters, but others are less easily dismissed. (More details on each of these under the spoiler warning.)

Transphobia: a major plot point in the novel is when a character is revealed to be trans, and this is treated very badly by almost every character. This is actually the one spoiler I knew ahead of time, because I'm trans and I read a little bit about this part of the book before starting it. But what I didn't realize is that even Lizzy was going to be weird and transphobic about it. She does quickly learn what she said/did was wrong, and becomes better towards the end of the book. But still, that section was frustrating and I didn't like it. It feels way out of proportion for her to fly home because of this, and to be honest I think Darcy forgives her too easily for this. Overall though it's clear Sittenfeld meant the transphobia to be a fault of the characters, and she herself doesn't agree with that, and so on and so on. I'm glad it was so clearly disputed in the book. But I still wouldn't have made that this big of a deal in the book at all.

Fatphobia: the fatphobia is one of the bigger issues I have with the book, as it's both blatant and not super clearly disagreed with. Lizzy as the narrator repeatedly says things like how she tries not to get caught up in diet talk, but that she's not completely successful. The characters' fatphobia is made fun of in some ways but reinforced in others. Charlotte is the only fat character that I can think of who is presented in a positive light, but she's repeatedly called unattractive--by the characters, but still. I think all of the characters who are portrayed as attractive are straight size, if not actively thin.

Racism: part of me wants to say the racism is disputed in similar ways to the transphobia, but I know I might also just be less focused on that since I'm white. Lizzy does definitely point out that several characters are racist, and this is seen as bad, and it's clear neither Lizzy as the narrator nor Sittenfeld as the author think any of the racism is okay. However, the casual racism just scattered throughout the book was still obviously not great, and I'm not sure how much of it was necessary or relevant to the plot.

Homophobia/lesbophobia: the homophobia was pretty bad in the beginning, and got a little better later on. I feel it could have been addressed more clearly, rather than just being accepted as normal, but I have less issue with the homophobia than with the rest of the things listed above. Lizzy's sisters are kind of awful about it though, and if you don't feel like reading a bunch of "haha you're a lesbian" "no I'm not" interactions, I wouldn't recommend this book.

Overall, I'm pretty torn on if I liked this book or would recommend it. In general I like Sittenfeld's writing, but the more of her books I read, I'm not sure if I should want to read them. I don't think this was a terrible retelling of Pride and Prejudice, though it's definitely a different story with different characters. I was also not super convinced by Darcy's character in general; I feel like in the beginning he was an almost irredeemable asshole, and then later he just sort of became nice and interesting. I don't buy that that's the same person with the same motivations.

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tay_af's review against another edition

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

It is a truth universally acknowledged that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should, and this book should not exist. It is maybe the worst book I’ve ever read. It featured an egregious misunderstanding of character dynamics and fundamental (and lovable) traits. Its attempts toward diversity were sloppy and self congratulatory at best, and more often, explicitly racist, homophobic, and transphobic in the execution, no matter how well intentioned it may have been. It’s insanely fatphobic as well: for instance, Charlotte Lucas’s undesirability which, in the original book, is principally linked to her lack of fortune and the fact that she is no great beauty, is replaced by a high paying job that cannot counter the fact she’s plus size. It’s a clear example in the need for sensitivity readers, even from authors who mean well. Beyond that, the writing is in general mediocre to abysmal, with terrible description and exposition. You have to try really hard to make Pride and Prejudice this bad, honestly. I could go on for days about it, but suffice to say, there are no redeeming qualities.

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rose10's review against another edition

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2.0

This is described as a modern retelling of P&P but I had issue that many of the characters and the writing were homophobic, and had other stances which didn't sit right with me. I'm not sure whether this was the author's intention, but it felt unnecessary in the story. I also felt that Liz's and Darcy's relationship lacked the spark which is a central part of the plot.

While the setting and context of the story has certainly been updated, this book felt very uneven in its pacing, with chapters often being little more than a page and suddenly jumping from one plot point to a sudden random thing next and events being resolved very quickly. I felt this book had a lot of potential, and started out with some plot points which I thought could have been very interesting, but ultimately this book fell flat and missed the mark.

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lenaricharz's review

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fast-paced

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

2.0

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