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by: Karen Joy Fowler
List Price: $14.00Amazon.com's Price: $11.20 You Save: $2.80 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780452286535
ISBN: 0452286530
Label: Plume
Manufacturer: Plume
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: April 26, 2005
Publisher: Plume
Sales Rank: 290201
Studio: Plume
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
The Extraordinary New York Times Bestseller
In California’s central valley, five women and one man join to discuss Jane Austen’s novels. Over the six months they get together, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With her eye for the frailties of human behavior and her ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Karen Joy Fowler has never been wittier nor her characters more appealing. The result is a delicious dissection of modern relationships.
Dedicated Austenites will delight in unearthing the echoes of Austen that run through the novel, but most readers will simply enjoy the vision and voice that, despite two centuries of separation, unite two great writers of brilliant social comedy.
“This exquisite novel is bigger and more ambitious than it appears… Fowler’s shrewdest, funniest fiction yet, a novel about how we engage with a novel. You don’t have to be a student of Jane Austen to enjoy it, either. . . Lovers of Austen will relish this book, but I envy any reader who comes to it unfamiliar with her. There’s no better introduction.”
—Patrick T. O’Connor, The New York Times Book Review
“Karen Joy Fowler creates a novel that is so winning, so touching, so delicately, slyly witty that admirers of Persuasion and Emma will simply sigh with happiness.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World
“Start quoting a few of Fowler’s puckish lines and it becomes damnably difficult to stop. . . The Jane Austen Book Club amounts to a witty meditation on how the books we choose, choose us too.”
—David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle
“The Jane Austen Book Club offers a sparkling rumination on the act of reading itself and how beloved books can serve as refuge, self-definition, snobbish barricades against other people or pathways out of the old self to a wider world. [It is] a terrific comic novel about a closed society merrily transforming itself by reading.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s All Things Considered
[Fowler] does so terrific a job of bringing her characters to life that Austen’s work falls away like a husk. It’s an impressive feat of homage, since Fowler essentially borrows Austen’s great themes…and makes them her own. Miss Austen would be proud.”
—John Freeman, The Denver Post
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - short on parallels to Austen
The book club members decide that they want to focus on only Jane Austen, because anything following would be a disappointment, and this is. I found the parallels between the Austen books and the characters to be so shallow, I wasn't always sure what they were.
If you want to read about characters in parallel with Jane Austen novels, I recommend Bridget Jones's Diary with Pride and Prejudice or Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason with Persuasion. Although there are some distinct differences ... Read More
Rating:  - Great fun for Austen addicts
How much fun is this? A whole book about women who love to read Jane Austen--a book filled with coy plot allusions, character references, settings and themes. What's more, it's a book that's filled with humor and hilarity. Fowler--dare I say this?--is almost as observant about the foibles of human nature as Austen herself. If I weren't getting enough of an Austen fix this year from the all-Jane-all-the-time marathon on Masterpiece, Fowler's book would be a happy alternative supplier of Austen's crackest ... Read More
Rating:  - Boring
What can I say? I wanted to like this book, but I just didn't. I have a rule that if I get to page 100 of a book and don't care about the characters or what happens next, I give up. Likewise with audio books: If, after listening for two hours, I am bored and unengaged I give up. I listen to many audio books and very rarely do I give up on any, but after 2 hours of this book I felt that life is too short to endure any more of this.. The narrators voice was dull and the story just didn't keep me interested. ... Read More
Rating: - A collection of stories
The first thing that popped in to my head after reading this book is that it is a collection of stories about the different characters. All the stories are suppose to add to the main plot of the book club and its members. The smaller stories sometimes go back in time and describe an event that shaped a particular book club members life, and this is to let the reader see why the character acts a certain way in the present situation.
The main story is about six members of a book club that focus on reading one ... Read More
Rating: - Let the Jane Austen Fest Begin
I've been on vacation and this means time to indulge in all my favorite activities, including reading a lot of books and watching a lot of films. I began feeding my Austen hankering with this book, The Jane Austen Book Club and it set the tone for an in depth look at this amazing talent, that manages to still play in the twenty first century.
The characters in this story, who gather together to form a book club focusing only on the work of Jane Austen, are well developed, quirky, interesting and have personal ... Read More
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