The Binats are a Pakistani family with five daughters the second eldest Alys teaches English Literature. In certain cultures it is still common for your great grandmother to remember that your cousin's future husband's grandfather stole mangoes from her tree when he was growing up. Family connections, gossip, and class can make or break a family in Diplabad. This is an interesting take on Pride and Prejudice where the traditional roles of women and the progress of the current era meet. In places like Pakistan there is are cultural mores, tradition and modern progress butting heads and women are trying to navigate these currents. Alys and Darsee meet and are spun away and together by their pride, prejudice, class and miscommunication. Can true love prevail in the face of such powerful forces. Pride and Prejudice is a love story there is always a happy ending.

A fun addition to all the Pride and Prejudice retellings. The Pakistani aspect is interesting. It closely parallels Austen's time in that women are often proposed to without ever really having time to get to know the man. I enjoyed the book and recommend it if you, like I, can't resist a chance to revisit Pride and Prejudice.

What an enjoyable version of Pride and Prejudice. The Binat family were a mixture of personalities. Mrs. Binat has one mission and it is to see her five daughters married to rich eligible men and she is not subtle about it. Jena is kind and generous, Alys is fearless and outspoken, Qitty is an artist, and holds her head up no matter that her sister Lady always puts her down due to Qitty’s weight. Mari is religious and wants to make sure everyone goes to heaven and Lady who just wants to have a good time. Of all the sisters, I liked Alys the most. She cared about her family and was very protective yet she had her blinders on about certain things and people. Sisters Sammy and Hammy were so irritating. I think fans of the Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice will enjoy this version set in Pakistan. I found it an interesting take on the original story with lots of laughter and touching moments.

I am not much for modern retellings of Pride and Prejudice but I enjoyed this one. It was witty and opened a new perspective, makes you realize that there are Mr. Darcy's all over the world.

I have heard it said often that life is to short for a book that you don’t like. Therefore, life is too short for this book. I really did try, but it was just so slow. Combine that with crude language and I’m just not interested.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Just one thing about this retelling of Pride & Prejudice kept taking me out of it—it's ridiculous that it takes place in a world where Pride & Prejudice not only exists, but the main character is extremely familiar with it. If your life starts imitating a favorite book in every detail, down to the <em>names of the people you know</em>, you'd think you might notice!

I received a free e-copy of this book from NetGalley for review purposes.

The high-starred reviews on this one got me really excited. I'm a sucker for Austen, and I know P&P like the back of my hand. Which made this... disappointing. Here's the thing. It was a really good book. I enjoyed the feminism and the characters' forward-thinking opinions (well, some of them anyway). I loved the writing style, and I even like how Kamal really explored Alys' change of heart regarding Darsee, instead of leaving it to feel like she was wowed by his awesome house.

But despite all of that, I could *not* get past the fact that this was a literal retelling of the story I know and love, complete with similar-sounding character names and some even identical situations. My biggest problem is not that it was just a retelling, but that it was a retelling that CONSTANTLY referenced P&P and Austen, and yet the main character did not seem to realize she was freaking LIVING P&P! She talks about it all the time, but never once thinks, "Hm, I feel like I know how this is going to end because my life and everyone in it is exactly like this book I'm obsessed with..."

This would have been a four- or even five-starred review if the book didn't reference Austen at all. It was so amazingly similar that every time Austen was mentioned it threw me out of the story and back into the original. And in that respect, the Bollywood movie Bride and Prejudice did it much better. Yes, it was super cheesy. But there was no Austen reference, so I wasn't sitting there wondering why all the characters were so damn dense about it. (Plus, we got the Mr. Collins character and his "No Life Without Wife" hand gestures, and the ridiculous song, which are arguably the best things about that movie. So there's that.)

That said, if none of what I said above bothers you (and apparently it didn't bother a bunch of other P&P fans, so to each his/her own), then by all means, read and enjoy. I liked it, but because it constantly referenced its primary source, I couldn't love it.

This is a modern retelling of Pride & Prejudice set in Pakistan. It follows the same basics as the original story, with a few modern twists. The setting and culture make this especially fun. The main character, Alys, teaches literature at a local girls' school, trying to inspire the girls to think critically and make their own life choices instead of blindly doing what is expected of them, basically getting married and dropping out of school. I like these re-tellings. I thought this one was especially cute. If this is your thing, I definitely recommend this one.

I love Pride & Prejudice retellings. I also love all things Indian. I realize this is Pakistan, and that's probably incorrect of me to say. But I've been obsessed with foods from those countries lately and hearing about them in this book made me love them all the more. Plus, I went to an Indian wedding celebration in May that had a very similar set up to the one in this book, which made me miss that as well. Such a great retelling!

Unmarriageable is a retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that takes place in modern day Pakistan.

There were many things that I enjoyed about this novel. The author did a really nice job recreating the story and modern day Pakistan was the perfect back drop for it due to the apparent culture of raising girls to be wives and mothers while frowning upon a woman who desires independence and a career. The Binat sisters - Jena, Alys, Qitty, Mari, and Lady - had very distinct and individual personalities. Eccentric characters like Farhat Kaleen (or as Lady liked to call him, Fart Bhai), and the always dramatic, Pinkie Binat made this novel quite entertaining.

Unfortunately, the chemistry between Alys and Darsee was really lacking. There should have been chemistry stemming from the denial and then the gradual recognition of mutual attraction. The reader should be antsy with anticipation, waiting for Alys and Darsee to show up together in any given scene, and racing through pages, unable to wait until they finally get together. It just wasn’t there.

I enjoyed this cute and entertaining novel. ARC was provided by NetGalley and Ballantine Books.

Loved this book. A "Pride and Prejudice" for another generation, another country. Easy, quick, enjoyable read. I gave it 4 stars and from me, that's high praise.

For me this was a very interesting look at a Pakistani family's dynamics and interpersonal relationships. I know very little about the Pakistani culture so it was intriguing to me. I found it was easier to read when I wasn't so worried about making the comparisons between the original Pride & Prejudice and this retelling. I just let myself read and enjoy the story.

This book is a cute homage to Jane Austen's <i>Pride & Prejudice</i> with Pakistani flair.

If you're looking for an original work of fiction, this is not it. It's a reworking of <i>Pride & Prejudice</i> set in modern Pakistan. It is not merely inspired by Austen's work, but a version that closely mirrors the characters, events, and structure of the original. Kamal has replaced the characters with Pakistani characters whose names are carefully chosen so that a reader familiar with <i>Pride & Prejudice</i> will know exactly who they mirror in the original. For example, Mr. Bingley becomes Mr. Bingla, Kitty is Qitty, Jane is Jena, and so on. Add a dusting of beautiful Pakistani clothing and you have this book.

Just saying it's a homage doesn't mean that the author hasn't found her own way to make her mark on it, however. While clearly mirroring <i>Pride & Prejudice</i>, she's still found a way to update it for modern Pakistani issues, such as rising religious fundamentalism, the role of women and education in society, etc. For readers with no knowledge of Pakistan, it's an accessible way to learn more about the country and its cultures.

Recommended for fans of Jane Austen and anyone wanting some light reading with more diversity than what's usually on offer from publishers.

This was a largely well-written and highly amusing take on Pride and Prejudice. In a modern version of this novel, and to stay true to the repressive, controlling atmosphere and public censure women were forced to endure in Austen's time, you would have to set the story in a religiously-strict locale, and in this case it’s Pakistan that was chosen. The story is set in 2000 and 2001, and with a lot of character name changes, largely follows the outline of Austen's story. I found it entertaining, but I have some observations to make on the 'translation' into modern times and exotic locales.

I think in general the novel was very well done, with some good decisions made about how to translate various characters and situations into modern times. If I had one initial complaint that popped out at me during the reading, it would be the rather annoying self-awareness the novel seems to exhibit with regard to it being a riff on an Austen Novel.

Austen's works are mentioned frequently enough that it was bordering on becoming a parody at times, and the pretension in name-dropping of what are too-often considered 'the classics' in novels was irritating to me. There is an endless stream of novel references which, whenever I'm reading a novel that does this, typically feels to me like a tool used amateurishly as a lazy substitute for actually doing the work of showing that your character is intelligent and educated, and I'm never impressed by it.

That this was set in a non-English-speaking country. Believe it or not, there are very many such countries, and American writers seem scared to death of choosing any as a setting for their work, so kudos to this author for being as fearless as she is inventive, but given this I found it somewhat annoying in its frequent use of foreign terms and phrases.

I don't mind the phrases in moderation; it’s a pleasant change. What I do mind is the ritualistic compulsion on the part of the author to immediately stick a translation after the foreign phrase. This really trips up the story for me because rather than adding some atmosphere and a bit of color and verisimilitude, it merely suggests to me that the author is trying to sound clever.

Personally, I find it far better to include such words and phrases infrequently, and give them without a translation, allowing the context and your reader's smarts provide an understanding for them. Have a little faith in your readers! As it was, it could have been used less and as such would have been less irritating to me, and less disturbing of my suspension of disbelief.

Maybe it's just me, but a good example of this is where I read (and before you read on, be warned there is some bad language in this novel!), “How many times should I tell you not to not say behen chod, sisterfucker. It’s so insulting to women. Use your own gender and say bhai chod, brotherfucker.” To me it’s insulting that the author would think I cannot extrapolate from this context that the second phrase is masculine, so that she feels she needs to spell it out to me. She really doesn't! There were many instances of a similar nature.

An issue I've seen often with writers is when they're so focused on the text they're producing that they forget that this isn't supposed to be simply words on a page. It’s supposed to be a story of people living their lives, interacting, speaking...and hearing! So unless the main character's mom was routinely reading English newspapers (she may have been but there is nothing in the novel to indicate that she understood a word of English much less could read it), then only way she would know any given English word is from hearing it used, perhaps on TV.

The thing is that if you hear it used, you do not routinely mispronounce it as though you had read it somewhere! Even if you do misunderstand it, the whole process is different when it runs through an auditory process than when it runs through a visual one! So from the nervous nelly of a mom here we got a lot of mispronunciation-cum-malapropism such as "Pinkie, say ‘Tetley’ again. What did I tell you, Goga, ‘Tut-lee!’." We also got, for example, "Prince Chaarless and Lady Dayna." I don't see how you can get that unless you understand English reasonably well and are also dyslexic in English, neither of which applied to Mrs Binat! So, suspension of disbelief issue here!

Another example of this was where one particular character's name was deliberately mispronounced by one of the siblings in this story's equivalent of the Bennet family, so that it became "Fart Bhai." Fart is an English word, not a Pakistani one, so that name would not have sounded insulting or like a young boy's bathroom joke in any Pakistani language. Pakistan doesn't have one main language, but several. There are five which are spoken commonly. In Pashto fart is 'goez', in Urdu it’s 'puskee', and in Punjabi, in which district I assume this action is set, fart is 'garama', as far as I can determine using online resources. None of these sound like the English version of the word, so this joke made little sense.

A similar situation arose when the author had Wikaam (Wickham) set his price for marrying Lady (Lydia). In the Austen original, he doesn't actually set a price, but an amount is bandied around as a minimum, and this is £10,000. In today's money, that would be about £300,000, or almost $400,000 (depending on current exchange rate). So Lady is highly undervalued here! The amount stated in this novel $100,000 which is only about £76,000.

I found this most curious because Pakistani currency isn't dollars; it's rupees, one hundred of which are worth (at the exchange rate when I wrote this), only seventy-five cents. So very, very roughly one rupee equals one cent. An equivalent evaluation for Wickaam, in Pakistani coinage, of taking on Lady would be something like fifty three million rupees!

Perhaps the author thought that sounded far too high to western ears? I don't know. As the author it is of course her choice, but it seemed odd to me to use dollars instead of rupees or pounds (given how often Britain is referenced in the story). This was obviously written for an American audience! I just pass this on to highlight how complex it can be to try 'translating' an old story for modern ears, especially if the setting changes.

And now a writing issue! The author chose the interesting solution of adjusting the character's names to fit what I must assume are Pakistani naming conventions. The De Bourgh family for example became 'dey Bagh', and George Wikham became Jeorgeullah Wikaam. Elizabeth Bennet was Alysba Binat, and Darcy became Darsee. Curiously this rule was not applied to the location in which the story was set!

The original story takes place in and around Meryton, but the story in this book is set in Dilipabad, which is a fictional Pakistani location as far as I know. Dileep is a boy's name meaning 'King of the solar Race', and 'abad' means these days, very roughly, 'city of' so it would translate as the City of the King of the Solar race, but I have no idea what that's supposed to mean! In the Punjab district of Pakistan, there is a town called Multan, a name which sounds similar to Meryton, and which is not far from Lahore. I don't know why the author didn't simply use that, but again, it’s her choice.

The author's technique with names though, had the advantage of helping to keep everyone's straight, although I confess I got lost from time to time. I think if I'd done this, I'd have been tempted to go a different way, but maybe this worked better. I’d have been more inclined to look at what the English name meant and use the local translation of that, so that Lydia, which means 'beautiful one' would translate to Sudara (close enough!), which is actually a pretty cool name, but that means Elizabeth (oath of god) translates to Paramēśura dī sahu which really doesn't work! So maybe this author's choice was the wiser one?!

But enough with the writing issues and criticism. As I said at the beginning, I found this story engrossing and entertaining, and it kept me swiping the screen and tempting me away from my own writing projects too often, so this was definitely a worthy read. It even helped, indirectly, by reminding me of the original story, to clarify and gel some ideas of my own in connection with my upcoming redux of Pride and Prejudice - which I haven't even started yet but which I have now decided is up next after the current project, and which I promise is not set in modern times, nor is it set in Pakistan!

So I am greatful to have read this for that alone, but it was much more than that to me. It offered more than a literary stimulant; it was a good sotry, well told, and made more interesting to me for the very fact that it was so different from the traditional retellings of this which have become multifarious as well as nefarious and are typically boring and uninventive at best, or badly done at worst. I am grateful this wasn't such a story and I fully commend it - and look forward to this author's next offering.

We definitely need more adaptations like this!
amazing take on pride and prejudice, and also I feel like it fills in the what if's from Jane Austen's version.
I need more by this author...write faster! Lol

We can all agree that it is rare for a reboot to rival the original. But in this world, where #MeToo and #WeNeedDiverseBooks live, I have found you a single novel that can be a gateway drug to fine literature, world literature, and women's literature.
Unmarriageable is indeed "Pride and Prejudice in Pakistan." But more importantly, it is the version of Pride and Prejudice modern students NEED to read. While a modern Westerner can intellectually understand the dilemma of Elizabeth Bennet in 19th century Regency Britain, the predicament of her and her sisters is somewhat removed emotionally for us. Women's lives got better. Women became able to inherit and work and even marry for love. Having this tale play out in modern day Pakistan adds a level of reality and urgency to the story that is hard to experience from the original with our perfect historical hindsight.
Simply put, Unmarriageable has legs because so many of the original norms Austen wrote about are still at work in the world today. We read stories about honor killings, forced and arranged marriages, preference of boys to girls, shooting of girls going to school from all over the globe (not just South Asia). And in this novel, we see the seeds of how small micro-aggressions lay the ground work for macro-aggressions against the disenfranchised.
Because Unmarriageable is able to step just a bit beyond Austen's exposure of the misogyny of the day, I hope and encourage educators to read it and consider adding it into your ELA curriculum. Unmarriageable not only presents the plight of women, especially "older" unmarried women, but also touches upon the struggles of gay men, interracial couples, unwed pregnant women, plus sized women, and class biases. And while the setting is Pakistan, many of these biases hit disturbingly close to the mark in Western society too. This book will also give educators an opportunity to teach about Partition, colonial occupation, India-Pakistan relations, Islam, the importance of education to women. And it may help some students realize how little they know about this important, populous and critical area of the world.
So...
Dear ELA Teachers Everywhere,

Please put down your copy of Pride and Prejudice. Just stick in that drawer next to you. Now open your computer and place an order for a class set of Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal (due out January 2019). Your Jane Austen discussions are about to get wild.

#Unmarriageable #NetGalley @Soniah Kamal

This was an enjoyable take on Pride and Prejudice. The storyline is close to Jane Austen’s classic book and will be very familiar to fans, but the interesting twist is that the setting is modern Pakistan. While familiar, the characters and plot seem fresh. I found it particularly impressive how natural the Pride and Prejudice plot translated to the modern Pakistan setting. This was a fun way to be immersed in Pakistani culture.

I loved this book. It did follow Jane Austin , but put it in the perspective of young Pakistanian women. I found Unmarrigeable to be a really charming story of relationships and finding one’s way. I read ian Arc of this book courtesy of Netgalley and the publisher. I highly recommend it. It was entertaining and sweet.

I really wanted to rate this book higher as I liked the book Pride and Prejudice but felt this book fell short. The character development was good but I did not like the way the family treated each other. To say one is heavy and won’t get a good husband was not something I enjoyed. Thanks to Net Galley for allowing me to read and rate this book,

Pride and Prejudice in Pakistan! I loved this contemporary re-telling. It stays quite faithful to the original, but the change of setting gives it a whole new feel. Alys is a wonderful new version of Lizzie- just as fierce and intelligent.