4.5

As someone who has read hardly any classics (if you exclude all the Shakespeare I was forced to study in school then none at all), I found this much easier to read than I was dreading. I really enjoyed the humour especially and struggled whenever it disappeared for long periods of time. There's plenty of words and phrases that I only inferred the meaning from context or just glossed over and that didn't really affect my enjoyment of the story on the whole.

I think the characters are the strongest part of the book. All the characters feel like very real people. I usually struggle with books that don't get into the heads of characters, because it makes me feel disconnected, but this is the rare case where it worked for me. I will say that there are still plenty of insights into Elizabeth's internal thoughts when necessary to give the reader the full picture. Btw Elizabeth is now one of my favourite book characters. She's sassy, down to earth, self-aware, and caring of those around her. She also grows from her mistakes in ways that are realistic and highly relatable.

On a note of easiness to read: I found it difficult to get through the physical book alone. There are large blocks of text with very few paragraph breaks on some pages and a lot of exposition. I ended up reading it with an audio version and then just the audio on it's own because I could get a better feel for the characters through the narrator. The emotions are rarely on the page, you kind of have to inject whatever the appropriate emotion is into the dialogue on your own , because it's rarely stated outright and sounds kind of dry on its own.