This is a must read for anyone that loves the classics! Mixing Jane Austen and the modern day world blended wonderfully.
A flew through the pages and it will be a book I can read time and time again!
Simply brilliant :-) ( )

This was one of the better Austen-inspired novels I've read. The characters had complex back-stories and the homage to Austen was thoughtful, not fluffy.
The story begins with Mary, an electrical engineer working at a tech start-up in Texas. She's in the midst of developing a passion project of hers, a set of augmented virtual reality glasses called Golightly, which would rival Microsoft and Apple, but just can't quite get off the ground. I was pretty impressed with the description and narrative surrounding her project, as it felt like a plausible innovation and a significant part of the plot. I was pleased that the author built up a plot that involved more than just Austen shout-outs and didn't jump immediately into that kind of fan gratification.

Meanwhile, Mary is holding at arm's length a man that she's terribly attracted to--Nathan, the temporary consultant at her company. His time is just about up at the company and he and Mary clearly have some kind of connection, but they're not getting any forwarder in their friendship. Mary's feelings on this subject are very relatable...a little messy, a little frustrated, a little scared.

When Mary's childhood friend Isabel invites her to go on a two-week Jane-Austen-style retreat to Bath, England to help Isabel finish her doctorate degree, she resists the idea at first. She's not all that much into Austen. Also her relationship with Isabel is complicated. These factors made for an original setup. She is not a gushing devotee looking for an escape, and her storyline involves way more than finding romance. She's also got to face issues that she's grown up with but never really resolved.

When Mary finally accepts the invitation, she starts reading her way through Austen. She's somewhat familiar with the canon, but now she finds unplumbed depths to it and really starts to enjoy the characters and the sharp insights. This created a nice balance once she finally reaches Bath. She looks on the whole experience with the eyes of an outsider, but she can also start to appreciate Austen's brilliance and appeal.

Once she's there she meets the other guests who've come to experience the Regency life. They're all nice people, including a very sweet older couple. Their immersive Regency experience is not stilted or absurd; they play at it with a good grace, but never to the extreme of looking like a bunch of loonies trying to escape real life. They're all very genuine throughout.

So. Now that Mary is where she is supposed to be (for the plot, that is) things can start to happen. Isabel goes into a dissociative psychological state, something she does as a defense mechanism when extremely stressed out, and Mary starts to discover and ponder things about their relationship. Then Nathan veers back into her life.

Mary's reactions to things toward the end of the book created extra drama that felt manufactured and did put me off a bit. But things wrapped up well, and overall I can say that this is a thoughtful and enjoyable read, with some lovely writing in certain passages too. It's got some substance to it, and I recommend it.

***Thanks to publisher Thomas Nelson for providing me with a digital review copy of this title through NetGalley! ( )

To see my full non-spoiler review: https://christianlovingbooks.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-austen-escape-review.html ( )

Isabel Dwyer offers her long standing friend Mary Davies, engineer, a two week stay in manor house in Bath - a Jane Austen theme stay.
Although well-written, I did find it difficult to like any of the main characters and I was not at all interested in the modern day ins and out of Mary Davies' job. More of a 2.5 rating for me. ( )

I picked up the audiobook of Katherine Reay's'The Austen Escape' because I was looking for something fun and familiar. It's a feel-good contemporary fiction book about a Mary Davis, a young American woman, leaving her home in Austin Texas to accompany her childhood best friend, Isabel, on a two week, Jane Austen-themed, trip to a manor house in Bath. Isabel is an Austin scholar doing her PhD on the appeal of Austen as an escape from the twenty-first century. Mary is an engineer in a high tech R&D company that she's been in since it was a garage start-up but is now struggling to cope with a boss who wants to introduce standardisation. The two are supposed to spend a two-week vacation at a Georgian manor house, dressed in costume and are supposed to take on the persona of one of Austin's characters. What neither of them expects is that Isabel will fall into a fugue and truly believe she is the character that she's adopted.

I live in Bath and have spent a lot of time working with R&D engineers so I expected to have a good context for this story. It turned out that that wasn't always a good thing. I was distracted by small details that didn't make sense at the start of the story - you don't go from Heathrow to Bath via Oxford - you won't encounter cobbled streets in the roads above Bath - you can't walk from The Royal Crescent to Assembly Rooms via The Circus and pass the Marlborough Arms along the way - English limo drivers are unlikely to have missing teeth. None of these things is important but they pushed me out of the story at first.

By comparison, the description of how R&D teams work, especially the cross-fertilisation of ideas between engineers and physicists, and the challenges in scaling up from start-up to major player while keeping an innovation culture were described very well.

The heart of the book doesn't lie with Bath or Austen or Engineering. It's really about two of Mary's relationships: the relationship with Isabel which Mary has outgrown but not outlived and her relationship with a consultant advising on the growth of Mary's firm.

The relationship with the consultant is a well-done romance trope with all the frustrations and miscommunications you might expect. I particularly liked how this romance trope avoided clichés and was built around Mary's personality, accepting her introversion, her avoidance of conflict, her obsession with engineering design and her uncertainty about her own future and turning them into reasons why the romance should work.

Mary's relationship with Isabel was more complicated and more substantive. I won't give the details here because discovering them is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the book. I found the relationship to be much more complicated than it at first appeared and I liked that both Mary and Isabel went through some difficult but plausible changes.

The Austin context of the novel is more than decorative. Austin's observations and characters help Mary to look at herself and Isabel differently. The dressing up and role play really did provide a form of escape from their pasts that allowed them to make some choices about their futures.

Overall, I had fun with this book. It was the gentle, positive read that I'd been hoping for.

The audiobook format worked well. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear an extract from the book.


https://soundcloud.com/harperaudio_us/the-austen-escape-by-katherine-reay

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