List Price: $12.95Amazon.com's Price: $8.47 You Save: $4.48 (35%)as of 11/07/2009 17:19 EST
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping.
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9781594743344
Edition: Later Printing
ISBN: 1594743347
Label: Quirk Books
Manufacturer: Quirk Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: April 04, 2009
Publisher: Quirk Books
Studio: Quirk Books
Features:
Related Items:
Alternate Versions: Click to Display
Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.' So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Can she vanquish the spawn of Satan? And overcome the social prejudices of the class-conscious landed gentry? Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you'd actually want to read.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
This book has so much potential that it completely fails to achieve. It ends up reading like a serious alternative to the original novel by Jane Austen to which its humblest aspirations cannot hope to achieve. It should be funny, it isn't. I assume the additional 'author' hated Austen as his only achievement is to create a totally useless and pointless version of possibly one of the best novels ever written.
Rating: -
I have to say that I was immediately drawn to this book. The cover is fantastic! Unfortunately, the book itself in no way lives up to the promise of the cover. Every piece of writing (particularly dialog) added to Jane Austen's words feels clumsy, amateurish and puerile it truly is an effort to turn each page. The idea could have been irreverent fun but to do so the wit and light touch of the original words absolutely has to be maintained. And that, sadly, has not happened. Perhaps Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters will be better but, on the basis of this outing, I will not be finding out.
Rating:  -
"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" gets the 2009 Truth in Advertising Award. This is not so much a "retelling" of Jane Austen's beloved "Pride and Prejudice," as it is a reworking of the original story with a few passages about zombies, ninjas, and vigorous exercise. Indeed, this book is so loyal to the original work that for many pages the reader can essentially forget that zombies are part of the picture.
The highbrow in me thinks that's a good thing - generally the world is better off if more people read Jane Austen. And so if we read Austen cleverly disguised in "and Zombies" packaging, so much the better.
And yet . . . I have a considerable low-brow streak that wanted to see how far this zombie idea could play out. To the extent there are zombies and ninjas in this book, they are used to fantastic effect. From disrupting the legendary party scene in the first act to laying low the miserable Charlotte to being used as a device to demonstrate the joyous bond between Darcy and Elizabeth, these zombies never fail to disappoint. Often referred to as "unmentionables" by the prim living, the zombies are quite creepy and properly focused on devouring as many human brains as possible.
Also welcome are the ninjas employed by Elizabeth's nemesis, the Countess de Bourgh. Only the most gifted and demented author would have thought to use the timeless clash of superiority between Chinese and Japanese martial arts as a metaphor for British classism, but it works here. The humble, eccentric Bennett clan has studied Shaolin combat techniques, while the uber-aristocratic Countess prefers the Japanese martial arts. Not only does this work for terrific social commentary, it leads to the scene where Elizabeth eats the still-beating heart of a mortally-wounded ninja. And who doesn't relish that scene?
And yet, there are many pages of this book that completely lack any mention of zombies, ninjas, Katanas, or Shaolin monks at all. When your hook is "ultraviolent mayhem," we need constant refreshing of this theme. All things considered, if I want to read the real thing, I will do it sans zombie, thank you very much.
And so, in a nutshell, you might not find a more clever book this year. But I have to say that, as a zombie-themed book, it is quite thin gruel that is rather unsatisfying. After all, while the zombie genre is no stranger to wit and humor, it is the enemy of subtlety.
I laughed out loud reading this book, and wholeheartedly recommend it.
Rating:  -
The idea of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies made me laugh. I even laughed at the beginning scenes of the book. However, the joke got old as the story went on.
Foul Language - Nope.
Sex - Two instances of sexual innuendo, that I remember.
Violence - Dispatching zombies. Not overly graphic. Other fight scenes involving human death.
Rating:  -
So I'm a big Jane Austen fan... Big deal. Want to fight about it? I'm also a huge zombie fan so when I found this book in a local Target I started jumping up and down and waving it in the air as a praise to all things brain-devouringly beautiful. After I bought the book, drove home, took out the trash, vacuumed the house and worked on the sprinklers in the front yard I finally got to sit down and enjoy what seemed to be a life long fantasy when after an hour and 70 pages in, I was feeling robbed... This was Pride and Prejudice and those were zombies but it was all wrong.
I understand that the book was written as a bit of a comedy mash-up but it just felt like something was a little, well, missing. For one thing, where was the funny?? Once I got over the initial concept of a zombie outbreak in a Jane Austen book, I don't think I cracked a smile once. Now a zombie comedy that does not make you laugh just seems like a zombie novel. So I read on in the light of it being a Jane Austen book with zombies and this brought up the second problem. Where is the story??? For someone versed in Pride and Prejudice, it was easy for me to enjoy that aspect of the plot but there was not enough of it to enjoy it for that. There was also not enough of the zombies to enjoy it for a zombie novel, so where does that leave the plot but feeling disjointed and as though each scene was out of place within its own fictitious universe which is a sad statement considering you are reading on and on for 320 pages. Each scene feeling more disorganized and reminiscent of a bad DJ mash-up featuring Sublime's Santeria and Johnny Cash's Hurt...just doesn't work and either does this book.
In summery, everything that was suppose to make this book fun just helped to make it a waste of precious time that could have been spent doing so many other things that actually ARE fun and not just hyped and pretended to be fun. Ever spend days with something and all the while you pretend to yourself that you enjoy it, hoping that you fall for your own lie? Thats this book. You will spend hours talking yourself into liking it for the concept, but in the end walk away disenfranchised and bored, thinking of how cool it COULD have been.
I give the book 2 stars for trying a brave concept. Sad he couldn't pull it off...
|
