Hey everyone! I'm back with my second book review, as promised. Today, I'll be reviewing this book from a webseries The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet so I thought of doing something a little different this time. In this review, I'll be raving quite a bit about the webseries since it accompanies the book.This book is the companion to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries webseries on YouTube, which is a modern adaptation of the classic, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, in a series of vlog-style videos by the protagonist, Lizzie Bennet. It follows the three Bennet sisters Jane, Lizzie and Lydia (Mary Bennet becomes their cousin and Kitty Bennet becomes Lydia's cat) as they handle their mother's old-fashioned views of wanting to marry off her daughters. Along the way, doubts about what love really mean pop up, true personalities are revealed and the sisters eventually learn to accept one another and those around them. If you loved Pride and Prejudice, you'll definitely love this clever adaptation!
I love how the webseries has so many Easter eggs and tiny subtle references to the original classic - it still nuanced the 19th century English lifestyle and beliefs but put it in a more modern, relatable context. As someone who's not a big fan of classics and has never read Pride and Prejudice before, this webseries made me curious about the original classic and I went to do some research about it so I could understand the adapted story and the relationship between the characters better.
As for the novel itself, it acts not only as a written screenplay of what went on in the webseries episodes but it also reveals some details that were glossed over in the episodes. It lets you see the story from Lizzie's point of view and lets you see her inner thoughts and feelings that she didn't want to reveal on camera to her online audience. After reading the novel and watching the accompanying episodes, I was able to understand the whole storyline a lot better when the missing links not revealed in the videos were filled in by Lizzie's diary entries in the book. The book acts as a backstory to the events documented in Lizzie's vlogs, explaining why she said the things she said and why she did what she did in the vlogs.
The characters are also very 4-dimensional. Each character has so many layers that they reveal over time, you see different sides to them coming out and you learn so much more about who they are on the superficial level and on a deeper level. That's what makes this whole series is so good, each character is more than meets the eye and are all developing characters in their own ways. The team behind the series even made social media accounts and individual separate YouTube channels for the characters so you can see how far they went to make the characters as "real" as possible.
Overall, I highly recommend you guys check out this series and the novel as well. The way the book and the vlog series tie in so well together with the small details and add depth to the entire storyline. The webseries was created by Hank Green (if you're familiar with the stuff he does on his own or with his brother John Green, you know what to expect haha) and it's even won an Emmy in 2013 so that should be enough proof of how good this whole project turned out to be. I love how adaptations like these bring such classics to life in a modern way and it makes "nerdy" topics like these more relatable for a younger audience. Definitely a must-read for fans of the classics and casual readers alike!
Lydia
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