Pride: 10/29/18

Pride by Ibi Zoboi is a retelling of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I'll be upfront and say I'm not a fan of the source material but I am a fan of Zoboi's works.

Zuri is proud of her Brooklyn neighborhood and watches with fascination as the brownstone across the street from her family's apartment building is gutted and modernized. At the start of summer the Darcy family moves in. They are black and they are rich and Zuri can't quite wrap her head around that combo.

Zoboi calls her novel a remix. It takes the salient pieces of the original and reworks them into a modern, Brooklyn setting. It looks at the Darcy family in terms of gentrification and class within the black community. It explores the noise and chaos of poor urban living, vs. the more controlled, sterile one of wealthy urban living. It looks at how what some take for granted what others have to struggle to achieve.

The book also fits into the road narrative project. It's a 336633, or family, home, blue highway. Basically the entirety of the novel is set against the apartment and Darcy home as they exist within the neighborhood. Even Zuri's trip to DC and the eventual move farther out in Brooklyn are set in contrast to the apartment building and the roads that lead to it.

While Zuri is the narrator, she includes her sisters and her parents in her story. She is not in contrast to them. Even when she is traveling alone or with Darius, she is thinking about her family and her neighborhood. Even later when she has fallen in love with Darius and has moved, she is still thinking of her family.

The blue highway connects Zuri to her neighborhood via bus or by a ride given by Darius. Or it's the subway. The subway which connects the city together while vitally important isn't on the same scale as the interstate or railroad.

Four stars

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