Posts Tagged ‘ Author: Jane Austen ’
Over at IndieJane.org, the girls are hosting a month long group read and discussion of Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Northanger has never been my favorite Austen novel but it’s growing on me (thanks to the 2007 BBC film) so I think I’ll join in on the reading, if not the discussion. Why not add a little light Gothic-ness to my horror saturated Halloween reading for the month? ;)
A lot of the time you can find me hidden behind a camera. There’s something about taking photographs that speaks to me. Perhaps it’s the way photographers can see beauty in everything around them or maybe it’s the solitude of venturing off with nothing but a camera and my imagination that gives me joy? Either way, I love it. Recently I decided I wanted to do a photoshoot with books, and who else should be first but the amazing Jane Austen. So one fine day, I put on a jaunty sun hat and strolled out to the garden with my Austen books in tow. Enjoy the results and stay tuned for Part II next weekend!
Today is Jane Austen’s 235th birthday! Hurrah! And in celebration of this wonderful day there’s some great things happening on the interwebs:
Austenprose is hosting the ‘Happy Birthday Jane’ Blog Tour. More details can be found here.
Sourcebooks, the world’s leading publisher of Jane Austen fiction, is offering a unique deal to readers who want to celebrate Jane by reading special editions of all six of Austen’s beloved novels in a 21st century format. Special e-book editions of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion and Mansfield Park will be available for free today and tomorrow. These celebratory editions include the full novels, plus the legendary color illustrations of the Brock brothers, originally created to accompany the books in 1898. Read more
Emma and the Vampires by Wayne Josephson and Jane Austen. © 2010 Sourcebooks Landmark. ISBN 9781402241345. Trade Paperback. Historical Fiction / Paranormal. 304 pages. $14.99 US. Source: review copy
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Synopsis
In this hilarious retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma, screenwriter Wayne Josephson casts Mr. Knightley as one of the most handsome and noble of the gentlemen village vampires. Blithely unaware of their presence, Emma, who imagines she has a special gift for matchmaking, attempts to arrange the affairs of her social circle with delightfully disastrous results. But when her dear friend Harriet Smith declares her love for Mr. Knightley, Emma realizes she’s the one who wants to stay up all night with him. Fortunately, Mr. Knightley has been hiding a secret deep within his unbeating heart-his (literal) undying love for her…
Review
Josephson states that he came up with the idea smashing together Emma and vampires in order to make Jane’s novel ”accessible to modern readers, especially young adults”. And perhaps he does, but I’m not impressed. We have our beloved Knightley, our gorgeous Highbury, a heroine only Austen herself could love and it follows remarkably close to the original storyline (I applaud him for that) … but it’s told in modern nomenclature which reads incredibly dumbed down.
Is Emma really that difficult for today’s young adults to comprehend … really? I could understand it with Shakespeare (and The Scarlet Letter which Josephson has also retold and published), but I just don’t buy it with Austen. Sorry. Also, it’s a bit insulting to insinuate that all teens need vampires in a book in order to read it. Maybe that wasn’t the motives behind the book, but it smacks of Twilight, True Blood and Vampire Diaries influence to me.
Emma and the Vampires is an okay read—quick and doesn’t require a lot of brainpower and slightly humorous—but I just don’t see what is so inaccessible about the original Emma. In fact, if I were to recommend any of Jane’s books to young adults, Emma (along with Northanger Abbey) would be among the first. They are the most teen-friendly, in my opinion.
Oh, and also our Mr. Knightley, besides the not sleeping and not eating bit, is really not much of a vampire at all. *sadface*
Bottom line: I would have had more respect for Emma and the Vampires if it were more like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. At least PPZ kept most of Jane’s original work and certainly continued with the dearly loved syntax and style when change was called for. Throughout Emma and the Vampires, I kept pondering, like others, “why am I reading this when I could be reading the actual Emma?”
Rating: 2 out of 5—it’s decent but just wasn’t my cup of tea.
Note:
This counts as my book #1 in the
“Jane Austen is my Homegirl”
Reading Challenge
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls by Steve Hockensmith and Jane Austen. © 2010 Quirk Classics. ISBN 9781594744549. Paperback. Classics/Horror. 288 pages. $12.95 US. [ Pre-order ] Source: copy from publisher
Ah, April in Meryton. The flowers are blooming, the sun is shining, the temperature is rising … and so is the undead body count. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls tells us the origin of how the Bennett girls of Longbourn became masters of the art of zombie-killing seen in the first book.
As the novel dawns, we are introduced to the first ‘dreadful’. Mr. Bennett quickly takes the reign of this tense situation and instructs Elizabeth and Mary on dealing with the ‘unmentionable’—and with that they witness their first killing. From here on out, the girls begin intense training in the Shaolin tradition of martial arts, first from their father and then from Master Hawksworth. From here …
“We watch Elizabeth Bennet evolve from a naïve young teenager into a savage slayer of the undead. We laugh as she begins her first clumsy training with nunchucks and katana swords and cry when her first blush with romance goes tragically awry.” (back cover) Read more
