Pride Study Guide

Ibi Zoboi, born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1977, moved to Bushwick in Brooklyn, New York City, at age 4. After earning an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, she published her first novel, American Street, in 2017. American Street, which was a National Book Award finalist for Young People’s Literature, tells the story of Fabiola Toussaint, a Haitian teenager who immigrates to Detroit alone after U.S. immigration refuses to let her mother into the country. Zoboi followed American Street with Pride (2018), a retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). In Zoboi’s version, a Haitian-Dominican teenager from Bushwick, Brooklyn, fulfills the role of Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet. In total, Zoboi has published five YA novels, two Middle-Grade novels, and one picture book. She also edited the short-story anthology Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America (2019). Her novel, (S)Kin, which came out February 11, 2025, is a YA fantasy novel that incorporates the Caribbean legend of the soucouyant, a magical creature that is human by day but a flying fireball by night. Zoboi currently lives in New Jersey with her family.

Pride takes place primarily in Bushwick, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York City. Part of the Lenape indigenous people’s historic territory, Bushwick was chartered as “Boswijck” in the 1660s by Dutch colonists in the province of New Netherland, which included parts of what are now Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. By the 1670s, however, England had gained control of New Netherland. In the mid-19th century, most immigrants to Bushwick were from Germany, and the region gained a reputation for its German-influenced breweries. By the mid-20th century, however, Italian immigrants—in particular immigrants from Sicily—had largely replaced the German population. Between the end of World War II in 1945 and 1970, Bushwick underwent another major demographic shift, gaining an influx of Black American and Caribbean immigrant residents. In the 21st-century, Bushwick began to gentrify: since Bushwick is located in Brooklyn with relatively easy access to Manhattan, professionals seeking rents more affordable than those in Manhattan began moving to Bushwick. Pride represents this gentrification through two families: the rich Darcy family, at the cutting edge of gentrification, moves into a newly renovated Bushwick “mini-mansion” in a transitional neighborhood—and shortly thereafter, the working-class Benitez family has to move out of Bushwick deeper into Brooklyn to flee rising rents. 

Ibi Zoboi’s YA novel Pride (2018) is a self-described “remix” of Jane Austen’s 1813 classic comedy of manners, Pride and Prejudice. Where the original Pride and Prejudice pokes fun at the British class system and gender relations in early 19th-century England, Pride analyzes class, race, and gentrification in the 21st-century U.S. with a particular focus on New York City. Other YA retellings of Pride and Prejudice that may have been influenced by Pride include Tirzah Price’s Pride and Premeditation (2021), in which a teenage Elizabeth Bennet attempts to solve a murder, and Sayantani DasGupta’s Debating Darcy (2021), in which the novel’s Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy analogues are high-school debate champions. In addition to its clear allusions to Pride and Prejudice, Pride also refers to U.S. historian and author Howard Zinn, most famous for his best-selling People’s History of the United States (1980), and to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir Between the World and Me (2015), to which protagonist Zuri partly credits her desire to attend Howard University (which Coates also attended). Finally, like Pride, which takes place primarily in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Ibi Zoboi’s novel YA (S)kin (2025) also features a teenage Brooklynite as a protagonist.