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    Pride and Prometheus
    Pride and Prometheus
    Pride and Prometheus
    Audiobook11 hours

    Pride and Prometheus

    Written by John Kessel

    Narrated by Jill Tanner, James Langton and Samuel Roukin

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    "Dark and gripping and tense and beautiful." -Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club and Pulitzer Prize finalist for We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves Pride and Prejudice meets Frankenstein as Mary Bennet falls for the enigmatic Victor Frankenstein and befriends his monstrous Creature in this clever fusion of two popular classics. Threatened with destruction unless he fashions a wife for his Creature, Victor Frankenstein travels to England where he meets Mary and Kitty Bennet, the remaining unmarried sisters of the Bennet family from Pride and Prejudice. As Mary and Victor become increasingly attracted to each other, the Creature looks on impatiently, waiting for his bride. But where will Victor find a female body from which to create the monster's mate? Meanwhile, the awkward Mary hopes that Victor will save her from approaching spinsterhood while wondering what dark secret he is keeping from her. Pride and Prometheus fuses the gothic horror of Mary Shelley with the Regency romance of Jane Austen in an exciting novel that combines two age-old stories in a fresh and startling way
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateFeb 13, 2018
    ISBN9781501982217
    Author

    John Kessel

    John Kessel lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife, novelist Therese Anne Fowler. He is a professor and the director of creative writing at North Carolina State University. He is the author of The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, Corrupting Dr. Nice, The Moon and the Other, and Pride and Prometheus.

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    Reviews for Pride and Prometheus

    3.5/5

    22 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      In this P&P sequel thirteen years has passed and Mary and Catherine Bennet are still living at Longbourn. But Kitty has not given up hope of marriage and to that end they attend a ball in town where Mary meets Victor Frankenstein. As their story enfolds we have the tale from the point of view of Mary Bennet, Victor Frankenstein, and the Creature.
      A very enjoyable and satisfying well-written story even if the ending was not what I hoped for.

    • 4/5
      Pride and Prometheus by John Kessel is a darkly magical re-imagining that fuses two great classics- Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice- into a seamless narrative. A chance encounter between Mary Bennett and Victor Frankenstein sets in motion a series of relationships that will leave them both forever changed. Victor is travelling with his friend Henry, brooding over his promise to his Creature to create a bride for him. As the pair have travelled, Victor has slowly been collecting the equipment and tools needed. He plans to part from Henry for a time, retiring to the remote Orkneys to complete his project. All that remains is to secure the body of a young woman. Victor's quest brings him in contact with Mary Bennett, that ends with an invitation to visit Pemberley, where Mary and her sister Kitty are currently staying. Both women are somewhat distressed over having reached their third decade and still being unmarried. Mary has some small hopes that Victor may yet save her from the life of an old maid. He has expressed some signs of interest. Victor's stay in Pemberley does indeed net him the body he needs, and he continues on to Emray Island, shadowed all the while by his Creature. And by Mary, who has gone after him in the wake of devastating events, hoping to find answers as to the cause. She ends up travelling in the Creature's company, learning more about Victor, and what the Creature seeks. Slowly, Mary begins to see the Creature, whom she calls Adam, as less a monster and more a human. Unfortunately, Victor does not accept that possibility. Can he still keep his promise in light of these feelings? Pride and Prometheus keeps faith with the styles of the original works, while still allowing the author's own voice to shine through. This story is told through Mary, Victor, and the Creature's eyes. Victor and the Creature speak as first person, while Mary's part is third person. It was neat to see the overlapping events from these myriad perspectives, each so very different from the other. As always, my heart ached for the Creature, and how he is treated. To be abandoned even as you are born, first of your kind, has to be deeply scarring. His conflicted nature shows clear and strong. He wants to despise humans, yet grows to accept Mary at the least. It was nice to see how Mary grew to regard him as acquaintance, if not friend. She helps him in as many ways as he helped her. I love that even the nested aspect of Frankenstein was kept, encapsulating the final events of that story when Mary chances to meet a person from the ship that found Victor in the Arctic, and from where the Creature stole his body. This story is a fantastically creepy homage to Shelley's Gothic masterpiece and Austen's Regency classic. It is a bold and well-played tale that will keep you reading long into the night. Recommended for those who love Frankenstein and/or Pride and Prejudice, and for any who love a good crossover sci-fi work. ***Many thanks to Netgalley and Saga Press for providing an egalley in exchange for a fair and honest review. Review for the Manhattan Book Review.
    • 3/5
      I have to give a lot of credit, in a way, to an author who decides to write a sequel to a classic novel (much less two). It's a gutsy thing to do, and risky, which I think is why I keep trying them – although, honestly, I'm hard-pressed to think of one that has actually been really good. You have to imagine Mr. Kessel telling people he was putting out a sequel to not only Frankenstein but – brace yourself – Pride and Prejudice …. It's crazy. It's crazy enough that it might work: mad gambles have pretty often turned out to be very enjoyable, in my experience. I think the best thing about this book was the mention, while Mary Bennet is in Lyme, of A young woman who had stopped there the day before with a party of visitors from Uppercross had fallen from the Cobb. Witnesses of the accident said she had lain as if dead. She was being attended to in the home of Captain Harville, only recently settled in Lyme." It was quick and not much attention was drawn to it, and I loved it. I have to say I didn't out and out love much else. I liked the way Mary and her growth to just-about-spinsterhood was charted (poor Mary); I liked how Kitty had grown bitter and reckless faced with the same fate. I appreciated the author's undeniable knowledge of both the books he was following up; he knows his Bennets (and Musgroves), and he knows his Frankenstein, and I never bickered with the way any of Shelley or Austen's characters were handled. Victor Frankenstein is self-involved – as Kerry Greenwood once said, "self-centred as a gyroscope", and absolutely clueless about what anyone else in the world, from his fiancée to Mary to his monster, might think or feel about anything. He also has a certain superficial charm that makes it easy to forget what a weasel he is.And I liked that the frightening thing about the Monster wasn't that he was green with bolts in his neck and looked like Boris Karloff or Herman Munster. "I have studied my reflection in still water. There is no obvious flaw in my countenance." His problem is that death lingers about him. He unsettles people because he's not … quite … normal. He is too still, maybe, too alien. Something this book points out is that he was created only three years ago – he's a three year old in a giant adult body, and has been through more trauma in that short life than a lot of adults. He's not normal. He can't be.So I had no argument with the approach, the premise of melding what happened to Mary Bennet after the events of P&P and Victor Frankenstein and his Monster after their book. The writing carried the day and made it very readable, if not perfect. My unhappiness with the book was simply the place where Kitty and Mary are when the book opens, and – not to be spoilery – where the book takes them and Frankenstein, maker and monster. "At least Lizzy and Jane had taken an interest in Kitty; they had brought her into their homes for months at a time, and put her in the way of any number of eligible men, while they were content to let Mary live at Longbourn, the sole object upon which their mother might inflict her nerves. As far as Jane and Lizzy were concerned, Mary might retire into spinsterhood without a sigh." That's disappointing. Mary, here, has changed and grown from the stupid-smart girl of the book, and it's depressing that it all came too late for her, and that her family doesn't even notice. She has broadened her outlook – and at least this actually gave her something to talk about with her father. However, " He warned her of the sad fate of the female bookworm: 'Beware, Mary,' he said impishly. 'Too much learning makes a woman monstrous.'" Undoubtedly. She has finally begun to understand things like the fact that "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing." Also depressing is the fate of another secondary Austen character, someone I always rather liked, and who deserved better. And then there's Mr. Collins, who is thriving in his absolute obtuseness. But most depressing at all is the book's headlong rush in exactly the direction I thought, with dread, that it might. Remember how Kitty coughed all through Pride and Prejudice? So does the author. And thus the story takes a turn to "an impossibility so out of keeping with the world of Bingley and Darcy" that the world Austen created quails away. The believability of the whole thing stumbles around the same time. Again, trying not to be spoilery, suffice to say that Mary undertakes a two hundred mile journey under conditions which would be quite frankly physically impossible for – well, for any woman of the period, and darned unlikely for most women anytime. Sanitation, sustenance, safety, access to adequate clothing and footwear … it's all lacking, and I found it ridiculously improbable.I suppose I should be grateful that the book did not do one thing I feared it might (which is a full-on romance between Mary and Victor, which because of so many things would have been such a horrible mistake), but what happened instead was just … disheartening. There is no clichéd happy ending, for which I was relieved … but there's no real happy ending at all, and that's surprisingly hard. The usual disclaimer: I received this book via Netgalley for review.