Pride and Prejudice and Passports

Not gonna lie, I love Pride and Prej, and I’ll read pretty much any Jane Austen retelling. In the latest one, Pride & Prejudice and Passports, the Benitez family are semi-documented immigrants. Noa, the oldest daughter, was brought to the US as a baby, so she works under-the-table and waits for legalization. Elisa and the other girls were born in the US, so Elisa has a shot at college and upperclass work, but of course that can’t be investigated too closely without revealing her family’s status. When Noa helps out her parents by cleaning their rental cabins, she meets the handsome republican politician, Bingley, and they fall almost immediately in love. It’s just the sort of meet-cute and effortless romance that perfectly modernized Jane and Bingley. Naturally, Caroline Bingley is not impressed by her brother dating the housekeeper, which also modernizes the original very well.

This worked on one level, because you could actually see class differences between the Benitez family and the Darcy/ Bingley contingent. But it was hard to sympathize with the republicans or really care very much about the entitled, wealthy class. As republicans veer more and more from being people who’d quite like lower taxes, to being people who want lower taxes for themselves, at literally any cost to other humans, and are willing to ally themselves with the lowest of the low in hope of saving a couple bucks… It’s harder and harder to have a sympathetic republican character, let alone a republican politician who inherited his position from his dad.  Sure, it’s pretty realistic to have a young man who’s a republican because his dad told him that democrats are lazy takers or bleeding hearts or whatever, but it still made Darcy completely unappealing. It takes a LOT to make Mr. Darcy unattractive, but hey, this book managed it. 

Clever retelling of the Benitez sisters’ stories, but attempts at political messaging just made Darcy and Bingly into unsympathetic, entitled bros and killed the romance.