I have this annoying, compulsive need to read Pride and Prejudice stories and then rate them not as books, but as whether they were as good as reading P&P for the first time, which probably means I should have my good reads account confiscated.
Anyway, this was awesome, Kamal is extremely clever and the story itself brings alive both Austen’s novel and Pakistan in a way that is both a reinvention and post-colonial act of reclamation - making British literature more Pakistani rather than the reverse.
AND - nothing throws me out of an Austen retelling faster than the characters in it professing to love Austen and not noticing they’re in an Austen retelling. I honestly don’t think I could trust a guy named Wickham ever and...Alys just does? Yes, I know, suspension of disbelief, but as a person named Elizabeth who encountered P&P and 12, the idea that other people aren’t about one truth universally acknowledged away from reading Austen into everything boggles my mind.
My other kvetch is that, in the retelling, I found that either I or Kamal were relying on the reader’s familiarity with the original so that some of the major scenes felt like they went by too fast because some of the content was from the book I wasn’t actually reading. And while that’s probably better than bringing in Austen’s tone in a book where Kamal does such a good job otherwise setting her own style, it still felt undeveloped at crucial moment.
But I’m so glad I read it and I’m so very glad it exists.