Jane Austen is not dead, but in fact a vampire. She has spent the last 200 years watching her popularity rise and her books fly off the shelf, without ever receiving a royalty check. She cringes as people rush to her small bookstore in upstate New York to buy the latest unauthorized sequel, spin-off, retelling, or companion novel to her books, and shudders to hear both readers and authors misinterpret her characters and their motives. And to make the sting even worse, the novel she wrote just before she ‘died’ has been rejected by publishers 116 times.
She lives alone with her cat in order to keep anyone from getting too close and finding out what and who she really is. But things become complicated when Jane is suddenly pulled back into the spotlight and must find a way to enjoy it without letting her true past be discovered.
I read this book on a recommendation and it was actually quite fun. Jane is easy to relate to and her frustrations with her life and the book world are believable and understandable. There are a lot of literary references thrown in, which at first were fun but the joke wore thin pretty quickly. Jane finds herself in some rather funny situations and there are a couple of plot twists that made me laugh (even though I’m not sure that they were supposed to be all that funny).
This book was headed for four stars until the end, where it set itself up to be a series. The idea is cute, and the irony of it being a Jane Austen spin-off about Jane Austen mad about all of the spin-offs works for one book, but not as a series. Once the set up was introduced I sort of soured on the whole thing, mainly because the irony is lost once it becomes a series.
So go ahead and read this book if you would like a good laugh and to hang out with a rather believable Jane. It was fun, I just can’t enjoy it the same without the irony of what it was as a stand-alone novel.
I felt the same way this one- I enjoyed it until the ending.
ReplyDelete