I love Pride and Prejudice. I love retellings of Classics. So I should have loved this.

The premise is great, and let's face it - if there was a zombie apocalypse, Elizabeth Bennet would be on the front line. But this was... well, it was awful. Yes, I did read to the end, because a) I was desperately hoping it would get better and b) I was almost having fun disliking it. (Spoiler: It did not get better.) There were moments of promise, but they were few and far between, and outweighed by the frankly cringe-worthy innuendoes.

If this had been written from scratch, it might have been okay, but shoe-horning zombie scenes into a terribly abridged version of one of the most famous and well-loved English classics just felt forced and detracted from the original characters and story. I'm not the target audience, and I know that - after all, the blurb describes this as "something you'd actually want to read". Personally, I "actually want to read" Pride and Prejudice and other great books. But just because you're being tongue-in-cheek (which is really giving it too much credit) or a parody doesn't mean that it can't - or shouldn't be - good. The book was lazily written, but acknowledging that doesn't stop it from being terrible. It's only redeeming qualities (and the reason it has two stars instead of one) are that most of it was written by Jane Austen and that somehow, against all the odds, I read to the last page. Even if I was banging my head against a wall while doing so.