So I picked this up because I loved Elizabeth Acevedo's performance in...something and now I have no idea what and I was looking for what else she did and I have this problem where I see the words "Pride and Prejudice" on a book and I feel compelled to read it.
This leads to disappointment less rarely than seeing "Jane Eyre" does, but it's not always a surefire hit.
Zoboi's story, though, is amazing. First, she gets that retellings build on the bones of the story and don't need to hit all the plot beats. She keeps the elements that tell her story and jettisons or replaces the elements that don't work. And she understands that the essential conflict between Lizzie and Darcy is not that he's a jerk, but that they are close enough to share the same world and distant enough that they see it through radically different eyes. Zoboi uses that to skillful effect. Her politics are louder than Austen's--a feature of the time, perhaps, as much as the politics in question--and the fact that she is so invested in using Pride and Prejudice to tell a story of gentrification and poc life in New York rather than using the latter as the backdrop for the former makes this a really good retelling.
And I'm particularly grateful for Acevedo's narration and the way she performed Zuri's poetry. This was definitely a book to listen to.