Character driven Jane Austen homage.
This is one big celebration of the life, works and legacy of the amazing Jane Austen. All of the characters have a special relationship with Austen's works, and these relationships are the corner stone of this book. The characters are what drives the narrative forward, as the plot is pretty loose and inconsequential. But if you love Jane Austen and love finding new nuggets of wisdom in her works or finding new ways of interpreting her words, you do not want to cheat yourself out of this book.
👍 What I Liked 👍
Intertextuality: I LOVED how many Austen plot lines (especially the romantic ones) that I could identify in this book. Several times I caught myself thinking stuff like "this is just like Persuasion" or something like that. I love those little nuggets of realisation and rekognition and this book is full of them.
Insights: I am a massive Jane Austen fan (just see my blog for all the Austen content there) but Jenner still managed to open my eyes to some new and exciting aspects that I had not considered earlier. Being a bit nerdy when it comes to Austen myself, I really appreciated these insights, which might even affect the way I read Austen next time.
Characters: This is, like I said earlier, a character driven book with a big ensemble cast of characters. They all live in Austen's last hometown and each have been affected by her works in some way. These characters, and their relationship with Austen, were often beautiful, heart-breaking and funny. Each of these character went to great transformations throughout this story.
👎 What I Disliked 👎
Get going: The beginning felt very slow. It took a long time to built up to the actual story about the Society. This was, of course, mainly because of the large host of characters that had to be introduced and staged for the real beginning of the story. So I understand why it was slow. But that didn't stop me from getting quite impatient...
Plot: As I said, this is a character driven story where the plot was definitely not the centre piece. Sadly, I prefer plot-driven stories. So this probably didn't appeal to me as much as it could have, if the plot had had more to say.
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