Review: Prom and Prejudice by Elizabeth Eulberg

While my now adult daughter was culling her bookshelves at my house, she put this one in the giveaway pile. Now, there was no way I could part with a Pride and Prejudice retelling without first reading it myself. I do love Pride and Prejudice like every other white girl English major in history and while this was cute enough, it didn't have the bite of the original to elevate it beyond simply rehashing the story.

Lizzie Bennet is a junior at the very exclusive Longbourn Academy, a boarding and finishing school for girls in Connecticut. She is a gifted pianist and it is this talent that won her a scholarship to Longbourn. The other students are awful, ultra-rich, entitled little snots, with the exception of her genuinely sweet and kind roommate Jane Netherfield and the other scholarship student, Charlotte Lucas. Lizzie endures brutal bullying (for instance, someone throws a milkshake on her simply because she is "poor" and she has her non-designer label winter coat stolen at a party, among other incidents) but she endures because this school is the place for her to be to further her musical education and eventually pursue a musical career. When the book opens, Lizzie is headed back to school for second semester, the semester where all of the girls are eagerly anticipating the spring prom, the biggest, most important social event on the Longbourn calendar. Jane is excited because Charles Bingley is back at Pemberley Academy, the boy's school, after a semester in London. With him is his standoffish friend Will Darcy. From there, if you know the original, you know the story.

Eulberg has stayed incredibly faithful to Austen and in this case a few deviations might have added a bit to the story. The character development relies entirely on the reader knowing the original novel, the dialogue can feel stilted and unrealistic for teenagers in the 2000s, and occasionally it has to try quite hard to bend a modern day story starring teenagers to the plot of the original (hence the idea that a few deviations might have been to its benefit). It's kind of cute and fluffy but, in the end, rather flat, lacking all of the nuance that makes Austen sing.