This was a so-so read. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but I remember when it first hit the shelves and everyone obsessed over it. I sort of put it in the back of my mind as a to-read book, but never thought I would as I love Austen’s novels on their own and really didn’t know what to expect with the introduction of Sci-Fi/Horror elements.
Overall this probably would’ve been a better novel if Grahame-Smith were a better writer, or a writer with better mimicry skills. The added parts stood out like sore thumbs (aside from the zombie material) and got very old very fast. It wasn’t just the zombie introduction that tried my patience with the novel, but the introduction of the Orient, from warrior training, to dojo and ninjas, it took a potentially brilliant idea and completely mangled it. Rather than just introducing the zombies and working with the time period and culture, he brought in a completely different culture and mutated the novel from a satirical social commentary to a rather ho-hum humorous horror novel. I also didn’t appreciate the crude humor, Grahame-Smith took the hinted impropriety a step to far, but I guess that’s what’s supposed to make it a comical novel rather than just a horror novel.
What can you say about Margaret Atwood that hasn’t been said? She has been nominated for countless awards (including 5 Booker Awards, winning once) and is just brilliant all around. I recommend checking out her 
This book takes place generations after the last book which makes it both an outlier of the five books and a hell of a lot more confusing than it need be. As it has been generations, the stories of the first four novels have become legends and the legends have become myth and are religious in their overtone.
This book was better than The Ships of Earth, but again I feel as if five books was a bit much for this story. It could easily have been split into two separate trilogies, but it wasn’t so we get the somewhat disjointed story through the first four novels and what appears to be a fifth book which may be completely unrelated.
Of the three novels so far, this was my least favorite. It dealt mostly with the journey from Basilica to the original ships that brought humans to the planet of Harmony. It was bogged down in details of the travel and the minor arguments between the main characters.