Jane of Austin: A Novel of Sweet Tea and Sensibility
By: Hillary Manton Lodge / Narrated By: Kate Handford
Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
I do so love the Austen-like stories. This one is jolly enjoyable.
Jane of Austin is a spin on Sense and Sensibility where big sister Celia is the sense, and our heroine, Jane Woodward, is all sensibility. She storms, she rages, she has huuuuuge flights of delight and fancy. The audiobook takes the original and adds originality all its own.
Their financial circumstances are dire, not because they weren’t left an inheritance, but because dear papa Woodward is out of the country, wanted for embezzlement and other financial transgressions. The sisters move to Austin, Texas because they need to have a new place for their tea salon, plus they’d like to go somewhere where they don’t suffer the ignominy of being known as his daughters. And just as in Sense and Sensibility, Jane’s love interest comes to their rescue, not after a fall that sprains an ankle, but because their trailer flies off onto the Interstate and Sean, naturally a musician, just happens to be driving his pickup behind them.
It was delightful to see the way Manton Lodge worked the classic out and added different twists to make this a fun and contemporary story. All the love is there, all the betrayals are there too. Plus, I liked Ben, the hero, here a military veteran who’s an amputee and dealing with PTSD. And need I say that I liked his service animal, a three-legged Great Dane? (Like an animal right off the bat? Who? Me?!?)
Two flaws. One, it gets into the details of the city of Austin far tooooo much. They’re planted into almost everything, as tho’ Manton Lodge wanted to prove that she KNOWS Austin. Two, the narration. Oh boy. When Kate Handford does dialogue, things flow nicely. The main narrative, however? A bland reading with very little inflection throughout. Add to that, there are tea salon-based recipes scattered throughout the audiobook, and the excruciating dullness of her tones as she lists each ingredient, states each step of the process, made me want to jam ice picks into my ears. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the way she narrates everything but the dialogue.
Still, as I said, I do love All-Things-Austen, and I’m a sucker for a good, clean romance, so I found the audiobook to be jolly enjoyable. It was the characters that held my interest; it was the way things were twisted and hammered out that delighted me.
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