After trying to read Emma by Jane Austen and being completely bored and not being able to finish the book, this version was a breath of fresh air.

For the rest of the review, please visit my blog at: http://angelofmine1974.livejournal.com/102886.html ( )

I've never read the original 'Emma' but I should hope it's not as weak as this offering. I trudged through this book for almost a month and should have given up on it long before then. Unfortunately, I'm a tad too stubborn and was "rewarded" with nonsensical vegan vampires, with no explanation on how they came to be, and a story with more holes than a donut convention. I didn't like the book cover either. Why the frick does the vampire have a smirk on his face? Having just had his head cut off shouldn't he have had a look of anguish or horror? And as the head is the heaviest part of the body how is Emma holding it when her hand appears to be relaxed and she's barely grabbing the hair?
The synopsis describes 'Emma and the Vampires' as being "hilarious" and yet I never even broke into a smile. At times it read like the plot to a cheesy slasher horror movie, where the college students always end up going out in the dark alone even though they know there's a killer about, as there were many instances where the characters would leave a gathering at night only to be confronted with the evil vampires attacking them. Why did they not just hold their get together during the day and save themselves the trouble? Besides, the evil vampires sucked (yeah, pun intended) anyway and always got their butts kicked so what use is the evil in the book when it never prevails over good in any way? There's no suspense involved when, for the upteenth time, the nocturnal vampires get beaten yet again and so they're more of a hindrance than any real threat in this novel. Heck, they need not have been in this novel at all for all the use they were.
Albeit a tad bit late I should mention that all men are vampires in this novel, good and evil, and Emma is trying to match up her friends with the good ones because that's obviously funny, right? About as funny as being staked in the groin over and over. I'm not wasting anymore words on this drivel and would have entered it into my 'Hall of Shame' except I felt sorry for Austen having her name associated with this heinous book...and I don't even like Austen! Horrible, horrible read. ( )

Josephson states that he came up with the idea smashing together Emma and vampires in order to make Jane’s novel ”accessible to modern readers, especially young adults”. And perhaps he does, but I’m not impressed. We have our beloved Knightley, our gorgeous Highbury, a heroine only Austen herself could love and it follows remarkably close to the original storyline (I applaud him for that) … but it’s told in modern nomenclature which reads incredibly dumbed down.

Is Emma really that difficult for today’s young adults to comprehend … really? I could understand it with Shakespeare (and The Scarlet Letter which Josephson has also retold and published), but I just don’t buy it with Austen. Sorry. Also, it’s a bit insulting to insinuate that all teens need vampires in a book in order to read it. Maybe that wasn’t the motives behind the book, but it smacks of Twilight, True Blood and Vampire Diaries influence to me.

Emma and the Vampires is an okay read—quick and doesn’t require a lot of brainpower and slightly humorous—but I just don’t see what is so inaccessible about the original Emma. In fact, if I were to recommend any of Jane’s books to young adults, Emma (along with Northanger Abbey) would be among the first. They are the most teen-friendly, in my opinion.

Oh, and also our Mr. Knightley, besides the not sleeping and not eating bit, is really not much of a vampire at all. *sadface*

Bottom line: I would have had more respect for Emma and the Vampires if it were more like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. At least PPZ kept most of Jane’s original work and certainly continued with the dearly loved syntax and style when change was called for. Throughout Emma and the Vampires, I kept pondering, like others, “why am I reading this when I could be reading the actual Emma?”

Rating: 2 out of 5—it’s decent but just wasn’t my cup of tea.

http://www.read-all-over.net/fiction/historical/emma-and-the-vampires-by-wayne-j... ( )

An interesting - and marketable - concept, poorly rendered. Emma is my favourite Jane Austen novel, so a mashup that combines Austen's characters with my current passion for vampire fiction was impossible to resist. I should have heeded the warnings of other reviewers, however!

The gimmick is fine, in theory. Highbury is inhabited by vampires - full vampires, the ebony-eyed aristocracy of the undead who feast on human blood, and 'vegan' vampires, identified by their blue eyes, who prefer to snack on animals (presumably they ate all the racoons in the UK). Messrs. Knightley, Elton and Martin are of the first ilk, whereas Mr Weston and John Knightley are 'vegan' or half-vampires, who can have children and seem to age at a normal rate. (Frank Churchill, as the son of Mr Weston, is a half-vampire, but 'turns' into the full-blooded variety at twenty-three, so he doesn't age past that point.) Vampires can also move about during the day, in a laboured attempt to explain how Mr Martin, a farmer, and Mr Elton, a vicar, could possibly become creatures of the night.

The only problem I have with this supernatural spin on Austen is the pointlessness of the whole enterprise - Emma and the Vampires is little more than an abridged version of the original novel with ocassional references to vampires thrown in. Mr Knightley as a 237 year old vampire could actually work, and would certainly explain why he has never married, but the irony is wasted on Josephson. I also thought that he was building up to an alliance between Frank Churchill and the wild vampires - the gypsies - who seem to be stalking Harriet Smith, but no. Knightley and the other Highbury vampires, irrespective of their status, join with slayers Emma and Harriet to lay waste to the interlopers, and the rest of the book continues in the same vein (sorry) as Austen's Emma. That's not even spoiling the story, because anyone familiar with the original novel already knows more than Josephson includes in this weak mashup.

Badly done, Mr Josephson, badly done! ( )

My first classic/horror mashup was a huge disappointment. Here we have the basic outline of the classic story by Jane Austen (though retold - so missing the sparkle of the original language) interspersed by references to vampires and vampire attacks. The problem with that portion of the novel is that the "logic" of the story is never explained. Almost every male of Emma's acquaintance is a vampire - but some are "wild" and should be killed, while others actually instruct her in the art of vampire slaying. Emma seems not to know that many of her friends are vampires, yet by the end of the novel discussions of such are quite open. Vampires who marry seem to turn their spouses to vampirism, yet the author goes on about how those men are thirsty and can't wait to satiate their thirst through their marriage - huh? Poorly done. ( )