It is a truth universally acknowledged that if a publisher can make money from a certain category of book, it must continue to publish said category. It's the genre that won't die! Jane Austen knock-offs, spin-offs, and even rip-offs. Seems like there's one coming out every month. Don't get me wrong. I LOVE Jane Austen and I've read lots of the modern recreations and reincarnations and liked many of them. Then, there were a few so awful I couldn't finish them... So, I picked up Shannon Hale's little book Austenland, ready to devour it or drop it.Austenland opens with Jane, a modern girl with a crush on Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy (I can SO relate!), receives a really cool gift from her aunt: Two weeks at Pembrook Park, an English estate that offers Regency era vacations. Jane will spend the time dressing, talking, and acting like a lady right out of Pride and Prejudice and she'll hopefully quash her obsession with the fictional hero and get on with her life.
Each chapter opens with a funny description of one of Jane's ex-boyfriends and you can see right away that it won't take much of a guy to improve upon her experience. So even though Jane plays along with the whole house party romance thing with a bit of chagrin, her fellow visitors live and breathe the verisimilitude of this Jane Austen theme park. With characters that would fit right into a real Austen novel, other than the rather wicked gardener who lets Jane watch college basketball on his TV, the book does its job of keeping you turning the pages and hoping that one of the gentlemen will turn out to be Jane's own real life Mr. Darcy.
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