The Jane Austen Book Club

by Karen Joy Fowler

Six people - five women and a man - meet once a month in California's Central Valley to discuss Jane Austen's novels. They are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but each of them is wounded in different ways, they are all mixed up about their lives and relationships. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable - under the guiding eye of Jane Austen a couple of them even fall in love..."I was enchanted. A charming and intelligent read, with the best appendix I've come across since Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time"" - Kate Long, author of "The Bad Mother's Handbook".

• ISBN10: 0141034300
• ISBN13: 9780141034300
• Publish Date: 1 November 2007 (first published 1 April 2004)
• Publish Status: Unknown
• Out of Print: 20 March 2008
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd
• Edition: Film tie-in ed
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 304
• Language: English

Reviews

I didn't like The Jane Austen Book Club at ALL.

I expected this book to be a tribute to Jane Austen, her life and her novels and for there to be great character development and relationships that are influenced by Jane Austen and her novels.

Instead, I ended up getting flashbacks from six characters that I formed NO connection with and present-day friendships and relationships that I couldn't care less about. Everything in this book is extremely shallow.

After finishing this book, I still don't understand what it's purpose is...

The Jane Austen Book Club is putdownable, forgettable and uninteresting.

[ibeforem]

I guess this is one of those books that you should only read if you’ve also read a lot of Austen, because I just didn’t get it at all. And it definitely wasn’t witty.

The only character that was actually interesting was Grigg, the sole man in the group. Compared to him, the rest of them seemed like unhappy, bitter old ladies, even though two of them are not old at all. Most of the time, it seemed like they didn’t even like each other all that much, and it made me wonder why they even had a book club at all. Especially a book club with such a limited scope. They don’t even continue once they’re finished the Austen books! What kind of book club is that? Plus, their conversations about the books weren’t even particularly interesting.

We won’t even speak of the horridly annoying use of first person (us, we) in the narration.

Maybe I was missing some sort of subtle connection in each chapter that related to the Austen book they were discussing, but based on some other reviews I’ve seen, I don’t think I was. I have heard that the movie is actually good, so this may be one of the rare instances of the movie being better than the book.

[cherryblossommj]

I just listened to the first CD and I'm not sure that I will ever attempt to listen/read the rest of this book. It's just too sexy for me. I'm just not into that kind of thing being in my plots. Although, I do love Jane Austen, I just couldn't get past the junk to get to her importance here.