Book #44: The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

Reading Among the Janeites piqued my interest in Jane Austen fan fiction (although this is a very specific type of JA fan fiction--not rewriting or continuing any stories she wrote or anything like that), so I checked out another book at the library that I'd heard about that was in a similar vein. I feel like I'd heard about this book a year or two ago, but for some reason never picked it up. But I read it all today (Dane napped for a long time--yay!) and it was definitely an enjoyable, quick read. It's a novel about six people (five women, one man) who start a Jane Austen book club and discuss a new one of her books every month, and about their lives and their relationships.

I liked how Fowler intertwined narratives about each book club member's personal life with the discussions and themes of each JA book they were discussing. I liked learning about each character and member of the group. And that was my main complaint about this book, too--that it didn't happen enough. I felt like I barely got to know the characters as much as I would like. You learn a lot of stories from their background and childhood, but you hardly even learn what each person did for their day job and what their personality is really like. I don't know if the book just needed to be longer and more all-encompassing, or what, but I felt like we didn't get enough from it. It was a great premise though, and I had a fun time reading it.