The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

Before I begin with the review, let me just say that I have finished setting all my exam papers for the year, a whole, whopping 4 days ahead of schedule! Either I am getting good at this or else the papers are dreadful - but I don't think they are! Anyway, now that I have jumped that massive hurdle, I now have time to get back to reviewing books!

The Jane Austen Book Club was a big disappointment. No, I lie. It was a painful disappointment. This was a book that I kept putting down to pick up anything else instead. The only reason I finished it was because I paid a fair amount of money for it - something I am still feeling a bit sore about.

There is very little reason to sit and mentally go through that again. So, for this one, I am going to cheat and just put up my Goodreads rant review.

One: I do not see what the point of this book was. Nothing happened - or at least nothing I cared about happened. The characters did not grow (although they claimed they had) by the end. Finding someone, reuniting with someone, does not automatically imply that a character has undergone a change. I was not convinced that any of these people had changed for the better or the worse. Granted, although we get snippets of their lives in the past and present, I never felt that I got a feel for any of them anyway. They were cardboard cut outs of people.

Two: I felt offended for Jane Austen for being dragged through this pretence of literature. If the author wanted to write a random snapshot of the lives of six people, why use Austen? Oh wait, because suckers like me would expect something good. It was a marketing ploy. As to the quotes used, I did not see the point either. Granted, in literature, connections can be made with anything and everything, but in this case I was left wondering why they were there.

Three: I did not care at all for the characters. While I have no objection to reading flawed characters, this lot were just annoying. They were bitchy towards each other, especially Bernadette, who was finally allowed to have what she was saying noted so as to stop a male writer from talking. Was this supposed to be some sort of pro-feminist text? Because they were really unnecessarily mean to Grigg, the only male in the group. And that in itself was uncalled for because he was no different from any of the women in the book club. Funny how it was clear that the comment from the writer was to be taken offensively, when it was fine for them to snidely make comments about Grigg serving the cheese on a Christmas plate and judging the quality of the snacks he made, even to the fact he had used a bought pastry base. Yes, they had done that too in the past, but the tone of that part was just dripping with judgement and disapproval.

Four: The writing was bland and disjointed. The descriptions of the scenes in general felt particularly choppy as the author would jump from one item to the next. Perhaps this would have improved with a bit of fleshing out, or completely being omitted. And then there was the repetitive car in the background that they could hear driving by. That happened multiple times.

Did not like. Do not recommend - especially to fans of Jane Austen's work.

It is the 69th book I have read for the 2015 TBR Pile Reading challenge.

I gave this one 2 stars on Goodreads, because, although it was bad, I did not find anything offensive in it (besides manipulating me into buying it because of the who Jane Austen thing).