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The Jane Austen Book Club Paperback – April 26, 2005

2.8 out of 5 stars 354 customer reviews

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Product Details

  • Paperback: 304 pages
  • Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons; Reprint edition (April 26, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0452286530
  • ISBN-13: 978-0452286535
  • Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.6 x 8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (354 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #360,979 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Top Customer Reviews

Format: Hardcover
According to Jocelyn, it is "essential to reintroduce Austen into your life regularly...let her look around." This is exactly her aim when she launches the "all-Jane-Austen-all-the-time book club" and invites five of her friends and acquaintances to meet and discuss one of Austen's novels every month.
Each of the members "has a private Austen," Karen Joy Fowler tells us in the opening line of THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB. For Jocelyn, a compulsive matchmaker and organizer extraordinaire of other people's lives, Austen "wrote wonderful novels about love and courtship, but never married." Bernadette, the oldest member of the group, has lived a colorful sixty-seven years, including a brief foray into show business and several trips to the altar. Her private Austen is "a comic genius."
Sylvia, Jocelyn's childhood friend, has recently separated from her husband of thirty-two years. Not being a happy ending person, Sylvia's Austen is more practical --- "a daughter, a sister, an aunt." For Sylvia's daughter Allegra --- a strikingly beautiful, self-described "garden-variety lesbian" --- Austen writes about "the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women."
Prudie, a high school French teacher afraid to visit France because it might not live up to her expectations, is the youngest member of the group at twenty-eight. Her Austen is the one "whose books changed every time you read them, so that one year they were all romances and the next, you suddenly noticed Austen's cool, ironic prose."
As for Grigg, no one knows who his private Austen is.
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Format: Hardcover
I see here that not everyone agrees with me, but I loved The Jane Austen Book Club. I thought it was cleverly written with wonderful characters and very, very witty. The premise is this: a loosely-connected group of acquaintences forms a book club to discuss Jane Austen's works. Each chapter of the novel focuses both on the Austen book at hand, and the life of the book club member hosting the meeting that month. With six members of the club--well, you are not going to be able to get into the nitty gritty of each member's life without a long, drawn-out magnum opus. Fowler instead chooses to focus on a few events in the various character's lives. They all know each other, so the various members pop up in the other chapters as well. The novel is narrated by all of the book club members, speaking as one voice, which Fowler uses to her advantage on many humorous occasions. Each character is wonderful, yet flawed. The novel is a comedy of manners in the modern sense. You will recognize parts of yourself and others you know in many of the characters. There is no true "plot" to this story, although the love lives of many of the members, while unresolved at the beginning of the novel, resolve themselves towards the end. The lack of plot doesn't matter, however, in this truly cleverly written, enjoyable, engaging novel. I think this one is a must for anyone who loves to read--you don't have to be an Austen fan to enjoy it. I for one think this novel deserves the hype, and believe me, I was pretty sceptical at first. Enjoy this one: it is a treasure.
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Format: Paperback
I had not heard of The Jane Austen Book Club until the movie came out. As one of my rules (mostly followed) is not to see a movie until I've read the book it's based on, I picked up a copy and added it to my "to be read eventually" pile. Well, I've finally gotten to it. I really don't see what all the fuss was for.

I'm not a raving Jane Austen fan, but I certainly do enjoy her work and have read most of her novels (Northanger Abbey and Lady Susan are still waiting for me). I understand the desire to have a Jane Austen book club. I understand each of the characters and their reasons for being in the club. I understand the concept of taking Austenesque characters and placing them into modern society.

What I don't understand is why so many people went nuts over this. Fowler doesn't write like Austen, and Austen's use of language is one of most enjoyable bits about her books. The other wonderful things about Austen's books is how women work within and around the social constraints of their society. In modern society, the majority of those limits simply aren't there, so Fowler has to invent other situations to produce emotional conflict.

She doesn't succeed very well.

The characters have issues, none of them really seem to feel them. There's not even any real suffering in silence, which is so enjoyable in Mansfield Park. There's little romance and little character growth. In fact, the only thing about this book that is common with Austen's work is that everyone winds up in a relationship in the end. Sorry to spoil it for you, but really, what did you expect to happen?

In fact, this book reads as though it was hoped to become the next Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, going all the way as to include discussion questions at the end.
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