I thought I would enjoy this book a lot more than I ended up feeling. Lily did not appeal to me as a character; honestly when you begin a book with the main character unabashedly discussing how she is stalking her ex-boyfriend...well. I expect some sort of pay off. Or improvement.

Lily continues to make the same mistakes, regarding men and her life, up until the last twenty pages. Any revelations or epiphanies she comes to through the course of the novel tend to be forgotten in her exhausting hunt for her Jane Austen Hero. ( )

What kind of a punk ending was that? Ugh. I didn't enjoy most of this book but the ending really disappointed. The main character wasn't super likeable and there wasn't a whole lot of light-heartedness to balance out the negativity at every turn. Just when the MC began to redeem herself by pulling her head out of her hindquarters, just when the happy ending I was hoping for started to reveal itself, Bam! The end. Not a happy me.

I've attended the Jane Austen Festival in Bath three times as a reenactor. For the most part, I'd say the author has got those characters down pretty good. Much as I love them, the Brits are usually the snooty ones who act more important than they should and the Americans are usually the snivelling ones who wish we could be just like them. Ha!!

Trigger warning: the main character deals with some pretty heavy emotions regarding her mother's recent death. This is hinted at nowhere on the back page teaser but should have been. ( )

I don't know if I've ever been so disconnected to the characters in a book as I was in this one, and the plot in general just depressed me. If I read an Austen-inspired book, I want some of the same pleasure that I get from reading actual Austen writing. I wanted to like this book, but it just didn't happen- and the writing itself was not bad! Hopefully it's someone else's cuppa, since it isn't mine. ( )

Being a big fan of Jane Austen myself, I enjoy books like this. A fun read.

FROM PUBLISHER: Lily has squeezed herself into undersized relationships all her life, hoping one might grow as large as those found in the Jane Austen novels she loves. But lately her world is running out of places for her to fit. So, when her bookish friend invites her to spend the summer at a Jane Austen literary festival in England, she jumps at the chance to reinvent herself.

There, among the rich, promising world of Mansfield Park reenactments, Lily finds people whose longing to live in a novel equals her own. But real-life problems have a way of following you wherever you go, and Lily's accompany her to England. Unless she can change her ways, she could face the fate of so many of Miss Austen's characters, destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

My Jane Austen Summer explores how we fall in love, how we come to know ourselves better, and how it might be possible to change and be happier in the real world. ( )

This was a good companion read to Mansfield Park without the predictable ending of the Austen book. ( )