Sawcat's Book Blog

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls - Steve Hockensmith This was a fun read. This is apparently a prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame Smith (which I have yet to read, although it was published first). It is set a few years prior to Pride and Prejudice, in the year when Elizabeth was set to come out into society. In this telling, about twenty years prior to the events, the living English were at battle with zombies (dreadfuls) and defeated them. After a time, zombie prevention methods (ie. decapitating the dead prior to burial) lapsed and enter the current events when the zombies begin arriving in Meryton again. In the previous war, Mr. Bennett had been a warrior, and begins training his daughters in the deadly arts. After all, Lady Catherine de Burgh was a noted leader in suppressing the previous war's zombies. This is smartly done. Its funny and has literary illusions that readers of the classics will get. A favorite is: "Lieutenant Tindall told me I'd find you up here tilting at putrid windmills. Now I know what he meant." Its not some hokey reworking of Pride and Prejudice. You get to see several of the Meryton townfolk and locations you're familiar with. But the familiar characters and places are put into more of a Shawn of the Dead situation, rather than a bad parody. I plan on picking up the other two in this series.

Currently reading

The Midwife's Tale
Sam Thomas
The Stand
Stephen King
The Name of the Wind (Kingkiller Chronicle, #1)
Patrick Rothfuss
Falling in Love with Hominids
Nalo Hopkinson
The Golden Compass
Philip Pullman
Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty
Dan Jones
Suffer the Children
Craig DiLouie
The Diary of a Young Girl
Mirjam Pressler, Susan Massotty, Otto Frank, Anne Frank