The Jane Austen Book Club: Summary and book reviews of The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler, plus links to an excerpt from The Jane Austen Book Club and a biography of Karen Joy Fowler.
The Jane Austen Book Club
by Karen Joy Fowler
Hardcover: Apr 2004,
288 pages.
Paperback: May 2005,
288 pages.
Nothing ever moves in a straight line in Karen Joy Fowler's fiction, and in her latest, the complex dance of modern love has never been so devious or so much fun.
Six Californians join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With her finely sighted eye for the frailties of human behavior and her finely tuned ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, 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.
Christian Science Monitor
I'm instinctively wary of genetic engineering, but Karen Fowler may have produced a literary equivalent of the elusive Super Tomato.
BookPage
Though Fowler takes Austen as her inspiration, she clearly possesses her own unique voice and gift for storytelling.
The New York Times Book Review - Margot Livesey
What strikes one first is the voice robust, sly, witty, elegant, unexpected.
Time Out New York
Fowler has fashioned a deft, witty multiple-character study and closely observed comedy of romantic manners.
San Francisco Chronicle
Karen Joy Fowler deserves every success this savvy, episodic but chamois-smooth novel can bring.
The New York Times - Richard Eder
The thoughts are more than literary discussion. They bring out the characters and emotions of the participants along with the tensions and sympathies that flit and filter among them. Ms. Fowler has the genial notion to see in the book club — that newish American cultural phenomenon — a society resembling nothing so much as one of those sets of country gentry among which Austen constructed a social comedy where irony stiffens sentiment, and pain is a cool afterthought.
The New York Times Sunday Book Review - Patricia T. O'Conner
What results is 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. At the end are plot synopses of all six Austen novels for the benefit of the forgetful, the uninitiated or the nostalgic.
The Washington Post - Michael Dirda
It's just as hard to explain quite why The Jane Austen Book Club is so wonderful. But that it is wonderful will soon be widely recognized, indeed, a truth universally acknowledged.
Kirkus Reviews
Bright, engaging, dexterous literary entertainment for everyone, though with many special treats and pleasures for Janeites.
Booklist - Donna Seaman
Starred Review. Fowler, a captivating and good-hearted satirist, exuberantly pays homage to and matches wits with Jane Austen in her most pleasurable novel to date by portraying six irresistible Californians who meet once a month to discuss Austen's six novels. Fellow Austenites will love Fowler's fluency in the great novelist's work; every reader will relish Fowler's own ebullient comedy of manners, and who knows how many book clubs will be inspired by this charming paean to books and readers.
Alice Sebold
A luxuriant pleasure!
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Melissa Disappointed I read this because of all the hype surrounding it especially for book clubs. I can't say I was overly impressed. I've read similar books that had better character development and more exciting plots. The ending was disappointingly predictable.... Read More
Rated of 5
by Robert Syrupy Chick Book Shallow characters and syrupy story line without much plot leaves the reader without much substance. Don't expect anything like the depth of "Reading Lolita in Tehran." Comic novel according to the NYT.
If you want a predictable plot, sugar... Read More
In a novel that is at once uproariously funny and achingly sad, Allison Pearson captures the guilty secret lives of working women--the self-recrimination, the comic deceptions, the giddy exhaustion, the despair--as no other writer has.
Nafisi’s luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran.
These are 2 of the 6 readalike suggestions for The Jane Austen Book Club. Members have full access to all readalikes. If you are a member, please login. To find out more about membership, click here.
Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today's globalized world.
The story of an American family, middle class in middle America, ordinary in every way but one. But that exception is the beating heart of this extraordinary novel.
First time novelist Vaddey Ratner captured my heart and senses in this novel based on her childhood in Cambodia. Her story transcends any news story...
read more
From the first page, I was drawn in by the lyrical writing of the author and mesmerized as the narrator, eight year old Raami, remembered the years...
read more
Trite but true, all good things must come to an end. I so wanted to keep reading the wonderful prose, the settings that let one think they are part...
read more
Amazon cuts off 5200 affiliates in Minnesota(Jun 19 2013) With Minnesota's online sales tax law due to take effect July 1, Amazon has played a familiar card by cutting ties with 5,200 members of its Associates...
Full Story
Christian Science Monitor
Alice Sebold
of 5
by Melissa
of 5
by Robert
Write your own review!
