Heidi Hart

I read this because it was the May selection of the Sizzling Book Club at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. I was leery of the premise: Jane, a thirty-something New Yorker, frustrated in love, goes to a Jane Austen themed vacation park in Kent to try to get her Mr. Darcy obsession out of her system, the way listening to a song you've had in your head for days will sometimes help kill an earworm. I was right to be leery. I disliked virtually everything about this book.

To be fair, while I love Jane Austen, there are very few Austen "spin offs" that I've enjoyed. (The only exceptions that come to mind are the BBC's "Lost in Austen" miniseries of a few years back, and the Emma-inspired Clueless, both of which I found cleverly irreverent.) So, strike one against this book is the clumsy attempt to blend the mannerly comedy of Austen with the modern world. The residents at "Pembrook" (the Pemberley-esque manor where most of the story takes place) are meant to try to speak in proper Georgian English and follow the strict social rules of the era, but their efforts are read-out-loud awful. Also, even while Jane makes some half-hearted effort to speak as Austen's characters did, she makes no such effort with her internal monologue, and the result is jarring and distracting, though at least Jane (and presumably Ms. Hale) seems to know that and acknowledge the ridiculousness of it.

Worse, there is something really distasteful about the very idea of the Austenland vacation: women go on holiday to wear corsets and do needlework and have restrained flirtations with be-sideburned actors in topcoats and tails, all culminating in a ball and (hopefully) a proposal, and it's supposed to feel real enough to set the hardcore Austen romantic's heart all aflutter, but not so real that anyone actually forgets this is a vacation with paid actors and everyone's supposed to go home without bruised feelings (and of course without getting laid, because that's just vulgar). The layers upon layers of artifice and hypocrisy necessary to the premise made me so uncomfortable, and as the plot wore on, it just got worse and worse. Two examples (warning: Spoilers Ahead):

1) Shortly after arriving at Pembroke, Jane has a flirtation with Martin, a gardener on the estate. She feels the need to escape the corsets and manners and restrained conversation, and so sneaks off to the staff quarters and watches a Knicks game with Martin and they end up making out on his couch. She is initially delighted by this, returns several nights running for more heavy petting, thinks she's over her Darcy obsession already, and then abruptly wrecks it by getting into a pique with him when she thinks he's judging her for that very obsession. As a result, she ignores Martin for most of the rest of the book. Ignoring a gardener may have been socially appropriate, mannerly behavior in Jane Austen's world, but blowing off a man you've been almost intimate with in the present day is just evil. Then, not only does Jane ignore Martin, but she throws herself more deeply into the sanctioned flirtation with the buttoned-up, Darcy-like Mr. Nobley, like a high school girl trying get more attention from her would-be boyfriend by flirting openly with someone else (with equally predictable results). When the end of the book reveals that Martin is also a paid actor planted in case some of the Pembrook guests have the urge to "go slumming", rather than vindicating Jane's behavior to blow him off, it just makes everyone involved seem more skeevy.

2) One of the other guests, Miss Heartwright, develops a flirtation with Captain East (closely modeled after the plot of Austen's Persuasion). Jane isn't sure whether their romance is real or if it is just part of the act, and she worries for Miss Heartwright's emotions when the vacation ends if the romance turns out not to be genuine. When the masquerade ends, Jane is taken aback to learn that "Miss Heartwright" is a wealthy socialite from California who has been to Austenland four times on her husband's nickel, and that she employs an acting coach to make her performance more authentic. Icky-Squicky. 

As icky as it seems, Miss Heartwright's approach to the experience is at least less emotionally contrived: as a return visitor, she presumably knows better than Jane the rules and limits of the feigned romances. She doesn't get her heart involved, and she presumably doesn't seek to wring real attractions or emotions from the men around her. By contrast, Jane keeps seeking confirmation that the connections she makes with Martin and Mr. Nobley are real and genuine, which made me (the reader) uncomfortable because what possible good can come from making genuine emotional ties with paid actors in a situation so far removed from one's real life? No good can come of it, except to feed Jane's stunted ego.

It doesn't surprise me at all to learn that Shannon Hale mostly writes juvenile fiction, because throughout the book, Jane struck me as a very immature character. She has an adolescent's intense self-absorbtion coupled with a stunning lack of self-awareness.

I didn't find the Happy-Ever-After ending believable or satisfying at all; it was abrupt, sophomoric, and had a sloppy straight-to-DVD half-assery about it. (Speaking of straight-to-DVD: they've made this into a movie: I have ZERO interest in seeing it.) Nothing in the book indicates that Jane has really learned anything at all, so there's no good reason to believe that her next relationship will go any more smoothly than the umpteen disastrous relationships before it.