Book Review

Title: Austenland
Author: Shannon Hale
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Publication date: May 29 2007
Number of pages: 208
ISBN: 1596912855 

Reviewed by: Tessa Perkins (Vancouver Correspondent - Canada) 

Perhaps if I had an unhealthy obsession with Colin Firth (aka Mr. Darcy), or Jane Austin novels, this book would have been pure joy; but I don't and it was far from it. A novel with a "reading group guide inside" on the front cover always makes me cringe as I picture old ladies holed up in a Victorian-style living room somewhere discussing the finer points of the story over tea and cake (except in the case of this novel the old ladies would be replaced with Austen addicts). Luckily this novel is very short and didn't take long to read. I found the writing style to be quite exasperating with many awkward moments where I had to re-read a sentence to make sense of it and many instances of the storyline seeming to veer off course and begin a new plot element before dealing with the first one.  

Jane Hayes is a typical thirty-something working woman who has a gross obsession with anything Austen, is ashamed of it, and knows that it is a damper on her love life. Jane's Aunt Carolyn leaves her a trip to "Austenland" (a resort for Austenphiles in England) in her will and thus begins Jane's "therapy" to rid her of the obsession. The resort is complete with actors paid to woo the guests, full costumes, and rules upon rules about how one must act to keep up the charade of Regency-era grandeur. Pretend romance blooms with scripted declarations of love and false hope for something to become real. Jane falls for the gardener because he is very unlike Mr. Darcy and she tells herself she is trying to kick her Darcy obsession. Just when she is getting close to him though, she decides that she should throw herself into Regency life and try to get one of the actors to fall for her while she pines for Martin the gardener.

The novel is contrived and unrealistic due to the fact that Jane goes to the resort trying to give up on her fantasy of a perfect Mr. Darcy type man, but ends up having that fantasy fulfilled in this role-playing fantasy. I expected the novel to end quite differently and make the point that obsessing over a character in a novel or film and comparing every man on Earth to them is unhealthy and will lead to loneliness, but instead it seems to say that one should hold onto those fantasies because that is the only way they will ever become a reality. Why does Jane go to Austenland? Would you binge drink to cure yourself of alcoholism? The premise in itself, seemed a contrived stretch of reality. 

The start of each chapter documents the story of one of Jane's ex-boyfriends, each one more embarrassingly ridiculous than the last. Jane is portrayed throughout the novel as a hopeless woman who cannot seem to get anything in her life straightened out, but instead of her changing that and becoming a more stable person who does not expect people to live up to unrealistic ideals, she conveniently finds a man who is as "intense" as she is. Instead of being a quaint novel about a place that re-creates Regency life, this book promotes Austen obsessions and seems to be trying to sooth those who may be suffering from this affliction.