If you're looking for my reviews of a certain author or genre you can check my tags list. You can also see my list of book reads in 2007 & 2008 and 2009.

Book Title: The Jane Austen Book Club
Author: Karen Joy Fowler
Genre: chick lit
Rating: 2/5

Summary (from book cover): In California's Sacramento Valley, six people meet once a month to discuss Jane Austen's novels. They are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but all wounded in different ways, all mixed up about their lives and their relationships. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and, under the guiding eye of Jane Austen, some of them even fall in love...

My thoughts: I've learned of this book as watching the trailers of the movie, which I haven't watched yet, and I really didn't knew what I was hoping for of this book. Maybe to be a light romance, as the ones I've been reading, or was hoping it to be something like The One You Really Want. Unfortunately, it wasn't like any of them.

Through six months we follow the life of six characters: Jocelyn, who breeds dogs for competitions; Sylvia and Allegra, mother and daughter who are passing through love problems during this period of time; Prudie, well married but who doesn't seem to see the luck she has; Bernadette, who lived through too many stories during her life; and Grigg, the only man of the group, fan of science fiction and who only read Austen for these meetings.

The character's stories are told through flashbacks and following the most recent developments of their lives, but due to the fact that there's a lot of characters for such a tiny book (it has no more than 250 pages, the other 50 something are summaries of books by Austen and what other people think of her *rolls eyes*), the reader can't create a bond with them. Also, the female characters were pretty uptight and seemed to have a really close mind for anything other than Austen, when it came to books, so it was easier to like Grigg, but still only to a certain extent. I didn't get the connection between the characters and the stories written by Austen. Better, I did get them, but you really need to be in a very good mood to see some of Emma in Jocelyn or Marianne in Allegra...

The book didn't convinced me. The stories and the characters aren't appealing, the discussions of Austen's books don't seduce either and it doesn't help to learn more of the characters, even though it leads to some flashbacks.