Pride
By: Ibi Zoboi / Narrated By: Elizabeth Acevedo
Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins
Not the best P & P Variation but certainly memorable…
Zuri Benitez is pride personified, and that’s probably the biggest problem with Pride by Ibi Zoboi in this urban retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. When Darius Darcy and his family move into their neighborhood, Zuri is ready to feel nothing or to feel scorn if she must be made to feel anything. After all, the hood is gentrifying quite rapidly, with uptight and wealthy white people coming in, all looking down on the original families of the neighborhood for their loud and vivacious ways. As Zuri says: The Benitez girls talk loud and laugh from their bellies.
And there are five Benitez girls, with Zuri and big sister Janae being the most ambitious of the five. The younger three are wild and loud and get into trouble and just generally cause uproars. I s’pose I appreciated that Zoboi gave all the characters the same beginning initials that the characters in P & P have because I would’ve been lost otherwise, just going by personalities. I didn’t see Lydia or Kitty anywhere, and I was looking really hard.
The Publisher’s Summary (Just shoot me now for reading it!) says Zoboi skillfully balanced cultural identity, class, and gentrification with “the heady magic of first love in her vibrant reimagining of this beloved classic.” Hmm, actually, when you listen to it, the book is really about cultural identity with little having to do with the beloved classic.
And then there’s Zuri’s whole pride thing.
Cuz, see, her biggest problem with Darius is that he’s not really black enough. She thinks it’s pathetic that he speaks like he’s white, he doesn’t know street slang, he doesn’t have the mannerisms that are acceptable in her hood. And that gets pretty annoying. Especially as Elizabeth Acevedo’s narration can make Zuri sound shrill and harsh. I get that she loves her family and her community, but she’s suuuuuper judgmental, and it’s all based on ignorance and an unwillingness to accept that the world might be wider than what she’s used to. I mean, Darius resides in the world at large, straddling black and white America both, and he’s not a jerk. Why does Zuri have to be? It makes for an unflattering heroine in this story.
But maybe I’m being a bit harsh. After all, I’m INCREDIBLY used to P & P variations that are INCREDIBLY bad, so I really should be quite thrilled with Pride. Alas, Zuri’s obnoxious ways, made even more obnoxious by Acevedo’s narration, grated on my nerves. I did, however, like that Zoboi made Zuri a poet, and I like that she recited. her poetry aloud. Huzzah for literate females with talent! But that wasn’t enough to make me care about what happened to her, and I felt that Darius got a raw deal when he hooked up with her.
A grand attempt, this retelling of a beloved classic. But definitely a flawed execution.
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