The Jane Austen Book Club

Mandy-Jane

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The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

What a fabulous book! I absolutely loved every word in it, and now I feel like I've lost a friend because I finished it. It was funny, sweet, sad in parts, happy in parts and just fantastically written. The group meets once a month to discuss a particular Jane Austen novel (bonus if you're a JA fan like I am). Each month, the meeting is held at the house of one of the members, and you also get to find out a bit about their individual pasts. The characters are just so well drawn; I love them.

The crazy thing is, I had this book for nearly a year before I even picked it up. If only I'd known!

Anyone else read it?
 

aruna

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I feel bad saying this but I began it but just couldn't get into it. It seemed so - disjointed. I never finished it.

(I feel even worse because it's not the first time - I keep saying I didn;'t like books others lived! Maybe it's just me!)
 

aruna

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One VERY interesting thing about this novel is that it is written in first-person plural - the only book I've ever read in this POV.
The narrator is a "we". And in each chapter, the "we" discusses a different Austin book and focusses on a single individual from the group. An "I" narrator as a part of this "we" never materialises - at least, not to the point where
I stopped reading it (about half way through).
 

Mandy-Jane

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Yeah that's true. It is different, and that's another thing I really liked about it. I felt that it tended to glue the characters together; make them appear as more of a unified and together group.