Title: Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict
Author: Laurie Viera Rigler [Website] [Twitter]  [Facebook]
Genre: Contemporary
Publisher: Plume
Format: Audio
Source: Purchased
Parental Advisory: language, references to sex, drugs, alcohol

“Even the smell of body odor has lost its usual overpowering quality tonight, heavily laced as it is with the mingled scents of soaps, perfumes, and the wax of a thousand melting candles.  I can almost understand for a second, even in all my twenty-first-century fastidiousness, that one could come to like the scent of a ballroom.  Is that Jane’s sensibility, I wonder, that’s responding to this particular melange of scents?  Or am I, my real self, responding to something else?  Certainly I don’t need a nineteenth-century frame of reference to pic up the erotic charge underlying the formality of the curtseys, bows, and nods of this elaborately stylized mating ritual.”

Summary (from the publisher):
After nursing a broken engagement with Jane Austen novels and Absolut, Courtney Stone wakes up and finds herself not in her Los Angeles bedroom or even in her own body, but inside the bedchamber of a woman in Regency England.  Who but an Austen addict like herself could concoct such a fantasy?

Not only is Courtney stuck in another woman’s life, she is forced to pretend she actually is that woman; and despite knowing nothing about her, she manages to fool even the most astute observer.  But not even her level of Austen mania has prepared Courtney for the chamber pots and filthy coaching inns of nineteenth-century England, let alone the realities of being a single woman who must fend off suffocating chaperoned, condomless seducers, and marriages of convenience.  This looking-glass Austen world is not without its charms, however.  There are journeys to Bath and London, balls in the Assembly Rooms, and the enigmatic Mr. Edgeworth, who may not be a familiar species of philanderer after all.  But when Courtney’s borrowed brain serves up memories that are not her own, the ultimate identity crisis ensues.  Will she ever get her real life back and does she even want to?

Opinion:
I don’t rightly no where to start.  It’s hard to put into words the kind of there-ness this book had for me.  Being a girl who isn’t a fan of shades of great I don’t like stating that I’m ambivalent about a book, but honestly, I kinda am in this case.  I didn’t love it, didn’t hate it.  Like I said, it was just kinda…..there.

The story is great in concept, though not entirely new, where a young twenty-first-century woman wakes up in nineteenth-century England.  Some of what you would expect was present — comparisons to the different worlds, freaking out about why she was there, and stuff like that.  But what there wasn’t a lot of was exploration of how she got there.  I know that isn’t the point of the story.  The point was to have that fish out of water become more comfortable in her surroundings and in that way the story did what it set out to do.  But I still wanted to know.

I also wanted to know more about Courtney.  In fact, the most interesting chapters were those that showcased her life back in LA.   I found the two(ish) chapters of her back-story far more compelling than the bulk of chapters that were set in the time of Jane.  I understand that this was a conscious choice on the part of the author, mainly because Courtney’s story is offered up in a second book, but without knowing that on the front end a reader could definitely walk away with this feeling of much being untold here.

Courtney as a character was alright.  There was little told about her life but that’s not surprising given the fact that she was living Jane’s.  She had wit and her internal dialogue was an interesting and entertaining way to learn more about the story.  But the story itself was a bit meh.  I did like that it seemed realistic, that the pitfalls of living in Regency England weren’t romanticized a great deal.  It was smelly, hygene was not on the forefront of people’s mind, and the clothes weren’t comfortable.

Despite the story being somewhat blase for me, I find myself wondering if my ambivalence towards this book is the direct result of having listened to the audio version.  Would I have liked it better if I’d been able to use my imagination more through the pages?

The narrator volleyed between whiny and what sounded like breathless angst.  There was no real change in tonal inflection of voice between Jane/Courtney and some other characters.  This isn’t a prerequisite of a narrator but I found her rendition to be tedious.  As a result, I think it might have unduly influenced my overall feeling towards the book.  There is a follow-up, Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, which I already have.  I’m going to give it a try to see if reading it on paper will make a difference in the tone of the story.

In the end, as I said I didn’t love this book and I didn’t hate it.  I think if you are a fan of Jane Austen or of stories that revolve in some way around Regency England you’ll enjoy this story.  It had a unique twist to it and had some fun and funny passages.