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SENSE AND SENSIBILITY AND SEA MONSTERS By Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters. Quirk Books. 344 pages. $12.95

Reviewed by Kelly Short

Kelly Short is a freelance writer and editor, and student.

If you enjoyed the “Naked Gun” movies, you’ll love “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.”
In “Sea Monsters,” Jane Austen supplies the highbrow, upper-lip angst, and Ben H. Winters keeps the gags and hilarity flowing.

As in the Austen original, this new book follows the stories and love lives of sisters Marianne and Elinor Dashwood. However, in “Sea Monsters,” the Dashwoods live in a different world, a world in which creatures of the sea attack and devour humans mercilessly and endlessly.
Sounds grim, right? Wrong. It’s funny.  The book’s magic stems from the absurd juxtapositions of English gentility and giant octopi.

Forget Marianne and Elinor Dashwood for a moment. Two characters, Lady Middleton and her mother, Mrs. Jennings, steal the show. These two alone make the book worth reading. They are natives of a far-flung atoll and were kidnapped by adventurers. How they deal with it is as hilarious as it is heartbreaking.

Take this paragraph: “Lady Middleton piqued herself upon the elegance and extravagance of her table, and of all her domestic arrangements; she loved to surprise her English visitors with displays of hospitality native to her homeland, such as flavoring her soups with monkey urine and not telling anyone she had done so until the bowl had been drained.”

And as for Mrs. Jennings: “Mrs. Jennings was a widow, her husband and male children having been ruthlessly slaughtered in the same raid during which she and her daughters were carried off in a sack by Sir John and his men. She had now, therefore, nothing to do but marry all the rest of the world.”
Go on. Read the book. Just make sure you don’t read in a place where you’re supposed to be quiet.