But pride might not be enough to save her rapidly gentrifying neighborhood from becoming unrecognizable. Brooklyn pride, family pride, and pride in her Afro-Latino roots. And those are not usually the heavy topic books.Pride and Prejudice gets remixed in this smart, funny, gorgeous retelling of the classic, starring all characters of color, from Ibi Zoboi, National Book Award finalist and author of American Street. That’s how I see my daughters read certain books that they return to over and over again. “It’s something they can discuss in the classroom and it can be a nighttime cozy read as well. “I even scale down the writing a little bit because I want young readers to fall into the story,” she said.
I want to give them a moment to breathe-especially teens of color-and some moments to be able to dream, shut out the world, and dive into something sweet.” She says that the experience of creating a book that delivers “a little bit of joy and hope and tenderness” for her readers inspired those same restorative emotions in her. Over a series of drafts it became clear that the book would not be a plot-point-by-plot-point retelling of Austen’s original, “so there’s more freedom to examine some more contemporary teen issues,” Zoboi said.īut in the end, Zoboi hopes readers will consider her book a bright spot in often-dark times: “As a writer, I needed something to take my mind off the heavy politics of the day, and I wanted readers to be able to do the same. “I have teens, too, and it’s something I’m dealing with personally living in Brooklyn,” she noted. Austen’s world helped her realize she wanted to address class and socioeconomic status in her book. “ Pride and Prejudice came up because I said I wanted to deal with political issues between two kids falling in love and the conflict between them,” explained Zoboi.
It was Zoboi’s editor, Alessandra Balzer, who suggested looking at the structure of classic works for inspiration. I actually started some projects before the election, and during, and after the election, but it was really tough for me to capture a light love story. “And it was especially hard to write a love story within this political climate. “Love stories are hard for me,” she said. Zoboi said she was having some difficulty finding not only the right approach to the book, but the proper mindset for it, too. “I wanted to go a little bit lighter after that and write about kids not dealing with violence or trauma, just falling in love, but still making some sort of political statement. “ American Street was just so hard to write,” she said. Pride arrives fast on the heels of Zoboi’s 2017 debut, American Street, about a Haitian girl who’s thrust into the rough Detroit neighborhood where her relatives live, while she tries to free her mother, who is being detained by U.S.
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