Pride, Prejudice, and Push-Up Bras

By: Mary Strand

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The Bennet Sisters: taking fate for a wild spin In this modern collision with Pride and Prejudice, college freshman Liz Bennet refuses to let her name—or Jane Austen—define her. Even though she’s one of five teenage sisters named after the Bennet sisters in The Book, as Liz not-so-fondly calls it, she can’t afford to let her life parallel The Book in any way. Period. Liz has big plans for her future, and they don't mesh with the life laid out for a fictional young woman 200 years ago. When Charlie Bingham and Alex Darcy arrive in Liz’s Minnesota town, her whole world flips upside down. Her sister Jane starts acting like a lunatic with Charlie. Alex is tempting but also a jerk. Seeing too many uncanny connections to The Book, Liz is afraid she can’t win. Is this fate’s little joke on her modern Bennet family? What’s a girl to do? Fight? Or ... surrender? Pride, Prejudice, and Push-Up Bras is the first book in the Bennet Sisters YA series. Independent Publisher listed it as being among the best Pride and Prejudice spinoffs in the past several years. Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine calls the lead character, Liz Bennet, “a true successor to her perspicacious namesake.”

A bit of Deja Vu and contrived story

This book say it was released in April 2025, but there are parts of this story that sound like I have listened to this before.
This story is a bit weird. It is portraying young people in the 2000s who keep using a landline and email instead of their cellphone by choice. Some of the writing made it seem like someone trying to write like a young person and failing.

1) It is hard to go back and listen to Virtual Voice after listening to real human narrators.
2) Some of the decisions and thinking of the characters is so idiotic where it seems like they had trouble thinking of a problem so they created a silly one. For example, Elizabeth is upset that Charles has not contacted Jane so he calls his office and gets a hold of Caroline Bingley as his assistant. She already knows that Caroline doesn't like her or her sister, so I am not sure why she would believe that Caroline is going to pass along a message and have Charles call her back. She never suspects that he didn't get the message.
3) Spoiler: Lydia goes to a detention school and they tell her mother that Lydia is going to boarding school and somehow believes that she won't find out??

I really had to power through to finish it. It was basically very silly and contrived and ridiculous.