22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Laughed Myself Silly, December 18, 2009
This review is from: Mansfield Park and Mummies: Monster Mayhem, Matrimony, Ancient Curses, True Love, and Other Dire Delights (Paperback)
Imagine the scene -- as I'm sitting there reading, I come to a particularly hilarious bit and start cracking up, and my husband looks up from his computer with a most decidedly odd expression. So I have to explain to him exactly why I should find a scene of an Egyptian mummy being raised from the dead hilarious. After all, aren't reanimated mummies usually the stuff of horror movies, tromping about in search of their next victim?
Except Mansfield Park and Mummies is not horror. Not at all. Instead of a monster that's a Menace because it's a Menace, the revivified Pharaoh East Wind, now calling himself Lord Eastwind and enjoying the sartorial splendor of a Regency gentleman, is a witty chap who just happens to have this little problem. Every so often he has to top off his supply of the Breath of Life, and out of deference to the lady of the house under whose roof he is a guest, he is constrained to take only a small portion of the life force of any one of the servants. Which he does with utmost politeness, wooing them with dreams of Egypt and exotic beauty, and leaving them missing a little time and feeling most decidedly odd.
And he's a bit of a romantic, and is certain that Fanny Price must be his long-lost love of thirty centuries gone by. Yes, here we have an undead who is genuinely capable of love, and of having his heart broken upon the steadfast devotion of the object of his affection for the rather dour seminarian Edmund. And thus even the final defeat of the Mummy's Curse has its poignancy, and leaves me thinking, "and seal it with a kiss."
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21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sheer joy, December 15, 2009
This review is from: Mansfield Park and Mummies: Monster Mayhem, Matrimony, Ancient Curses, True Love, and Other Dire Delights (Paperback)
A friend got this book for me as a Christmas gift,
since Jung's new _Liber Novus_ was a little beyond
her means.
I read _Mansfield Park and Mummies_ in one weekend,
with howls of laughter, then re-read it with fewer
giggles and more introspection. Poor Jane Austen has
had many irreverent and awkward send-ups over the last
decade. Many of her newer literary 'collaborators'
have only a smirking relationship with their source
material, sampling it randomly and layering it with
a slick, hip, high-fructose current-culture candy
shell to make it palatable to commercial fiction readers.
Ms. Nazarian's take has genuine affection for, and
understanding of, Austen's tone and background. Rather
than zombies shoehorned into the Regency, the budding
Egyptomania in her version of _Mansfield_ leads to a
hysterical comedy of class and errors, laced with
enough gags to stand beside 'She Stoops to Conquer',
'Jeeves and Wooster', and the Marx Brothers.
Readers who enjoyed the humor and Egyptology in Elizabeth
Peters 'Peabody' novels might really like this. Casual fans
of Austen should delight in it. And Austen scholars, recoiling
in horror from the recent Zombiefests, should give this one
a try. It's gold, and I can't wait for Nazarian's next foray
into the Austenverse.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fanny Price: Mummy Slayer, January 4, 2010
This review is from: Mansfield Park and Mummies: Monster Mayhem, Matrimony, Ancient Curses, True Love, and Other Dire Delights (Paperback)
I have always thought that Mansfield Park is the weakest of all of Jane Austin's books. The heroine, Fanny Price is a weaker character than Elizabeth Bennett and less interesting than either Miss Dashwood.
Not so in Mansfield Park and Mummies, where she is elevated to the status of mummy fighter and vampire hunter (but sadly, not slayer). The book is filled with hilarious footnotes and modern slants on Austin's historic social commentary. The author's deft touches keep the book interesting throughout it's considerable length.
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