Elizabeth Eulberg

For Lizzie Bennet, a music scholarship student at Connecticut's exclusive, girls-only Longbourn Academy, the furor over prom is senseless, but even more puzzling is her attraction to the pompous Will Darcy, best friend of her roommate's boyfriend.

Prom and Prejudice

Colleen

I love Jane Austen, but I really do not know why I put myself through the torture of reading Austen knockoffs. I've read more of them than I care to admit, but they almost all turn out to be terrible. This time, I will blame Goodreads. It keeps flooding my Recommendations page with Austen knockoffs. So for some reason, I gave in and read one of them.

I suppose Prom and Prejudice is cute enough. But it lacks any real legs. It isn't true enough to the style or substance of Pride and Prejudice to truly be a homage, but it also does not venture far enough on away from the original text to stand on its own. At its base, it is an amputated version of Pride and Prejudice boiled down into an insubstantial teenybopper chick lit. It is nothing that hasn't been knocked off numerous times before and in no way stands out from the many other Austen rip-offs. Eulberg basically took the outline of Pride and Prejudice and crammed into the prom-fanatic hallways of a modern high school.

The setting is a twenty-first century American prep school. While the elitism of that type of school might be compared to the classism of Austen's time, it really lacks any potency. The social stigma of not getting a prom date does not compare to the necessity of a good marriage in Regency times. The latter was quite literally vital to women's wellbeing because marrying well was the only way to ensure one would be taken care of. So any real stakes were taken out of the story.

The characters are mere shadows of the characters they were copied from. They are all flat, even the main characters and lean completely on nostalgia towards their prototypes. And I have to wonder how well Eulberg familiarized the text she purloined, because she made Lizzie a renowned pianist despite the real story making a point of her being an average player at best. And there were other characters who were so chopped down they might as well have been excluded. Such as Catherine De Bourgh who instead of being Darcy's aunt is just another mean girl at the high school. And the crucial confrontation that was a catalyst to the real story was nowhere in this one, so her character was quite pointless.

The attempts to capture Austen's voice were laughable. Mainly because those attempts involved a lot of copy-pasted dialogue from the original text. Do you know what happens when you copy early nineteenth century English dialogue into the mouths of twenty-first century American teenagers? They sound ridiculous. 

The whole story was lackluster. The only difference between a homage and plagiarism apparently is how long the author has been dead.

RATING FACTORS:
Ease of Reading: 3 Stars
Writing Style: 2 Stars
Originality: 1 Star
Character Development: 2 Stars
Plot Structure and Development: 2 Stars

Finished in one sitting. Such a cute read! (view spoiler)[Wish there was a chapter about their date in the end. (hide spoiler)]

Prom and Prejudice

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