Book #80: Jane of Austin by Hillary Manton Lodge

I've read a lot of Jane Austen retellings. I have a whole category dedicated to that group (and other Regency books). This one was a REALLY GOOD Sense and Sensibility retelling. Usually, most retellings seem to lose out in the characters' personalities or the plot just doesn't seem to translate to the modern era very well, and even if I enjoy them, it requires a little bit of suspension of disbelief to make it work really well. This book may have stood on its own, even without the Jane Austen connection--although, of course, half of the fun of a retelling is anticipating what is coming next in the original plotline and figuring out how they make it work in a modern storyline.

In this story, Celia, Jane and Margot Woodward are left to fend for themselves when their pretty much good-for-nothing father leaves them and the country after embezzling money at his company. Celia and Jane decide to set up a tea shop to make money, and things work well for a while, until their new landlords up the rent and kick them out of their San Francisco shop-space and apartment. So they move to Austin, as a new place to start fresh and find a new place to set up shop, moving in to the guesthouse of a cousin of their (dead) mother's. And... you can guess what happens from there. I really liked how Lodge was able to modernize the Dashwood sisters and their predicament, and how she wrote them in a way that made them seem almost less charicature-ish than most retellings and even the original story, where Elinor is SO logical and Marianne is SO emotional. In this book, the two sisters definitely had more of those personalities, but the story was told from Jane's perspective (the Marianne of the story), which I feel changes the whole point of the overall story. Instead of looking on at Marianne's hysterics and obsessive romance and thinking she's totally overdoing it, you are in Marianne's shoes and seeing her get swept off her feet by the picture-perfect guy. I also liked that we got into Callum Beckett's perspective as well (the Colonel Brandon), which also gives the story a lot more depth. AND I really liked all the quotes about Texas and tea before each chapter--I thought that was cute. The author must live in Austin or Texas, because she really knew her Texas food places--Torchy's was mentioned several times, and Amy's Ice Cream, and a lot of Austin favorites. I thought the focus on tea throughout the story was pretty cute. And I thought it was kind of neat how there were recipes sprinkled throughout the story, since Jane was a huge baker/cook herself (for their tea salon) and that was a major hobby and interest of her character's.

All in all, this was a riveting audiobook--I kept sneaking a chance to listen every time I was nursing or sitting down for more than a minute, and I thoroughly enjoyed this twist.