Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, by Ben H. Winters, Jane Austin

This book was put out by the same publisher as Pride Prejudice and Zombies.  I absolutely loved how Grahame-Smith used Pride and Prejudice word for word but as the story slowed and started to become a little boring, zombies would attack.  The kick-ass Bennet family with their amazing knowledge of martial arts would save the day.  Zombies being a minor inconvenience to the main story though, which made it hilarious.  Playing more on the stereotypes of the British keeping their stiff upper lip and persevering through times of war.  So I thought that Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters would be the same way except with sea monsters.

Wrong!  Winters changes a lot of the words and storyline to make the sea monsters and...pirates the main storyline.  Making the original story a minor focus of the book.  The problem for me is he has too much going on and it doesn't flow with the main story at all.  To start, he destroys the setting, no longer is there the elegant refined Britain that most people would picture during the Regency Era.  It's more like Pirates of the Caribbean has taken over Britain and everyone sings shanties and talks like a pirate.  Also the horrible things they eat *shivers* this was the scariest thing of the entire book.  For all the jokes people make about British food, the food eaten in this book is more like the weirdest tribal oddities in food from around the world.  Or The Fear Factors' cookbook.

Other complaints that I had we never found out why the Alteration(when the creatures of the seas or any other body of water turned on mankind)started in the first place.  There are plenty of speculations but I think if the author is going to basically disregard the main storyline, we have the right to know how all of this started.  I also found it odd, that if everything that lives in water was trying to kill mankind, why do people still live near the ocean?  Or have a gigantic under water city that I suppose was supposed to take the place of London in this book?  Winters changed a lot of other things why not move the family inland?  The British have done a lot of arrogant things through history, but this is just over the top.

Overall I felt lost in this book.  It took me four tries before I could actually get all the way through it.  For me the characters were too different from the original story, I didn't feel that I could identify with any of them.  In the original story you could sometimes either identify with the mature logical personality of Elinor or the free spirited personality of Marianne.  You could laugh and cry over their relationship problems and think to yourself, wow my life really isn't that bad.  In this story there are so many life and death situations that the relationships seem flat and unimportant.  Completely unromantic at all.  

For anyone thinking of reading this book I would suggest skipping it.  For me, even though Sense and Sensibility was Jane Austen's first book and is probably harder to read than any of her other books.  It's a lot easier to read then this book.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche