Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, by Laurie Viera Rigler

Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict is Ms Viera Rigler’s debut novel. I suspect that having a better education on all things Austen would increase the reader’s enjoyment of this book, since the author sprinkles quotes and bits of dialogue and all sorts of references throughout. Be that as it may, though, I find it generally charming and enjoyable all the same.

The story is narrated in first person, present tense (the second one I’ve ever read using this technique, the first one being Ann Aguirre’s Grimspace). The story flows easily, aided perhaps by the structure—the chapters are extremely short.

Here’s the back cover blurb:

After nursing a broken engagement with Jane Austen novels and Absolut, Courtney Stone wakes up and finds herself not in her Los Angeles bedroom or even in her own body, but inside the bedchamber of a woman in Regency England. Who but an Austen addict like herself could concoct such a fantasy?

Not only is Courtney stuck in another woman’s life, she is forced to pretend she actually is that woman; and despite knowing nothing about her, she manages to fool even the most astute observer. But not even her level of Austen mania has prepared Courtney for the chamber pots and filthy coaching inns of nineteenth century-England, let alone the realities of being a single woman who most fend off suffocating chaperones, condomless seducers, and marriages of convenience. This looking-glass Austen world is not without its charms, however. There are journeys to Bath and London, balls in the Assembly Rooms, and the enigmatic Mr Edgeworth, who may not be a familiar species of philanderer after all. But when Courtney’s borrowed brain serves up memories that are not her own, the ultimate identity crisis ensues. Will she ever get her real life back, and does she even want to?

The basic set up is close enough to the blurb: Courtney Stone falls asleep in twenty first century LA and wakes up in the body of Jane Mansfield in 1813 in England. Cultural shock ahoy! (more…)