The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen A. Flynn

In The Jane Austen Project, two people from the future time travel back to 1815 to meet Jane Austen and try to recover one of her manuscripts from being destroyed. Rachel and Liam are acting as brother and sister, who try to get in with Jane's brother Henry and to befriend Jane. This is obviously a very different sort of Jane Austen fan fiction, and I wasn't sure it would work super well, but I think it was very well done in many ways. It was so interesting to see the world of 1815 from the eyes of someone modern/futuristic--the things that wouldn't make sense to mention in Austen's original works. The things like the smells, the sounds, the uncomfortableness of the carriage rides. I really liked how detailed and how well-integrated all the imagery of the world was in this book. I also really liked seeing Jane Austen as a character in her own time period. She seemed like I imagine she would, and I liked her character a lot. My only real complaint about this book was the relationship between Rachel and Liam, the two modern characters traveling in time in this book--obviously they're going to fall in love (that's easy to predict from page 1), but I couldn't really tell why he liked her or why he seemed so odd around her sometimes. But mostly I felt like there was more talk of sex than I expected in a book set in 1815, even with futuristic characters (who are apparently more free and liberated even than today, haha). It wasn't terrible by any means, and nothing graphic at all in the whole book--but I just felt like a Jane Austen-esque heroine didn't seem like she should be thinking and talking about sex so much. It felt out of place and kind of willfully over-the-top to me. But I think the good parts of the book outweighed the not-so-good parts. The author is apparently a copy-editor, and she did a great job with her research and writing, and I liked this mesh of sci-fi and historical fiction.