All I knew about PRIDE was that it was a retelling of Pride & Prejudice. P&P has my favorite romance trope ever (probably due to its very existence and my rereads of it throughout my adolescence and adulthood) in which two characters believing the other to be awful upon first impression and then realizing, welp, I love them. Here's what I didn't know: this is a *YA* romance and the audiobook was narrated by none other than Elizabeth Acevedo, who wrote one of my favorite books of 2018 and whose narration is A+++ and needed in this WORLD. I'm not even exaggerating.

All the decisions Zoboi makes to update P&P into modern day Bushwick are on point. As I was reading, I really loved knowing the turns of the original and being completely whisked away by how Zoboi rededicates them in PRIDE. Elizabeth Bennett is now Zuri Benitez, a Latinx teenager in Bushwick who resents the gentrification she's witnessing in her neighborhood, and especially the boy who moves into the expensively remodeled house across the street, Darius Darcy. The update's strength is the focus on Zuri herself, who has a lot of feelings about everything around her. She channels them mostly through her poetry, which is shared in the pages as well (and if you've never heard Acevedo read poetry, you're missing out!).

This was such a wonderful read, that much like the original, I couldn't put down. I finished it in the span of two days, and I really liked the strong Afro-Latinx-Brooklyn cultural infusion of the text. Zuri is one hundred percent a modern day Elizabeth, but her worries don't lie in being married off to preserve her family's way of living (phew), and instead in college applications, her voice in her family and world, and her love of the rapidly changing neighborhood she's always known as home.