What does Jane Austen have to do with a Drake mixtape? For this episode, I was joined by Vermont rockstar librarian Meg Alison, in discussing Ibi Zoboi's Pride, a Pride and Prejudice Remix. We talk about gentrification, agency, and the amazing power of spoken word poetry, we give a shout out to DisruptTexts and ask teachers to think critically about the books they teach. Who is represented in their pages? And who isn't? And how did Zoboi's novel make one of our librarians think more deeply about a hotly contested road project in tiny Brandon, Vermont? Grab your six-dollar maple lattes, listeners, and find out.
Jeanie: I’m Jeanie Philips, and welcome to Vermont Ed Reads. We’re here to talk books for educators, by educators, and with educators. Today, I’m with Meg Alison. We’ll be talking about Pride by Ibi Zoboi. Thanks for joining me Meg. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Meg: Well, thank you for inviting me, Jeanie. I love listening to your podcast. I think it adds a lot to the conversation around literacy and being a literate community statewide in Vermont, so thank you. I’ve been a librarian since 2001 when I found myself as the first children’s librarian at the Joslin Public Library, Waitsfield, Vermont. Then moved to the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in Montpelier, then the Moretown School Library for eight years. Now, I’m at U-32 Middle & High School in East Montpellier, Vermont. It’s my fourth year there.
I’ve served on the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Book Award committee. I’m a lifelong bookworm. I love to read. I couldn’t be happier to be sitting here with you today in Waterbury, Vermont, talking about books, and one of my favorite books of the year.
Jeanie: We have talked about books a lot as friends and librarians. Thank you for your nice words about the podcast.
Meg: You’re welcome.
Jeanie: I’m so excited to have to you on. Let’s talk about Pride, this book that we both love so much, we’ve read twice. Tell me… just introduce us to the main characters and the setting, if you would?
Meg: I’d be happy to. Pride by Ibi Zoboi is actually a remix. Not so much a retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. There’s a lot that Zoboi pays homage to with Jane Austin’s work, but there is a lot of new themes that Ibi Zoboi also raises in Pride.
We have five sisters. Instead of the Bennet sisters, they have the Benitez sisters living in Bushwick, New York, a burrow in Brooklyn. The main character being Zuri Benitez. She’s a senior in high school, her sister Janae, who’d be Jane’s equivalent in Pride and Prejudice, is back home for the summer from Syracuse and there are three younger sisters. They live with their parents in a two bedroom apartment in Bushwick.
https://twitter.com/ibizoboi/status/1047892435664347137
Across the street, there is a mini-mansion being built where formally there had been a boarded up broken down building. Their very curious, the sisters. about who’s going to be moving into this mini-mansion in their hood. They take all sorts of guesses. Could they be rappers? Could they be basketball players? And could they be white? Gentrification is a theme we’re going to talk about in the story.
And lo and behold it’s Darius Darcy and his brother, Ainsley and they’re Black. It throws the sisters off their game. Zoboi has written a beautiful love story that is contemporary, authentic, and relevant. It follows the same theme as Pride and Prejudice. We have a happy ending, but not without a lot of grit, and resiliency, and great storytelling.
Ibi wrote that after she wrote her National Book Award-winning finalist debut novel, American Street -- that takes place in Detroit, which deals with a lot of heavy hard hitting topics about urban life, drug use, addiction, violence, and loneliness -- that she was looking to write something lighter. In light of the political climate of today, she needed a story that was going to bring light.