The Austen Escape

The Austen Escape was just what the doctor ordered after I finished the lengthy, if enjoyable, Nicholas Nickleby. This light and relatively brief novel features software engineer Mary Davies at a Jane Austen–themed mansion resort in Bath, England. A difficult new boss has complicated her work life, she's attracted to a consultant there, Nathan, who's moving on, and her complicated and competitive closest friend Isabel has insisted she join her for the Austen vacation.

Austenites will enjoy this - vacationers dress up in period clothing, become characters from the books if they choose, and a fair amount of the famous books is conjured up. Isabel, an Austen scholar, has a breakdown and is mentally stuck in the Regency period, ironically show more at the same time becoming easier to get along with. Nathan shows up to help Mary with the difficult situation, and their attraction is rekindled. I liked Mary's engineering bent, and this was a fun bit of more substantial than usual fluff. I'll be reading more Katherine Reay. show less

Like Dear Mr. Knightley, this book has many of the elements that I love: complex, imperfect characters who make mistakes, are confronted, and grow; great dialog and literary allusions to books that I love. If you haven't read all of Jane Austen's books, this book will make no sense. But if you have read them (preferably multiple times) and loved them, you will probably enjoy this one. Like Dear Mr. Knightley, it deals with complex friendships, misunderstandings, trust, and forgiveness. And like Dear Mr. Knightley, I stayed up too late reading it, then started reading it all over again to absorb all the nuances and details.

Here's one great quote: "How people treat you is only 10 percent about you and 90 percent about them, so you need to show more be careful how you react and how you judge. You never know someone's story."

Content considerations: kissing, the characters socialize in bars. show less

My request for this book was followed by immediate regret, but it was predictable: another story about a woman taking an Austen-themed vacation, with the lagniappe of amnesia in her friend? It's like catnip. I was a bit sorry to be approved for it, but felt like something light and quick at the beginning of the year, so I cracked it open (so to speak).

And lo and behold, it was kind of wonderful. Actually, a couple of kinds of wonderful. I couldn't be more surprised, I don't think. It turned out to be the story of a woman rediscovering her path, finding a way to hit a reset button and go back to things that make her happy.

And of course it's also a love story, and a good one. It's the story of Mary Davies's love for her father (and vice show more versa), and of a love that seems to have died out, and a love that just doesn't seem to click. That's a major part of it – but just about as important to the story and to Mary is the exploration of her love for her vocation, the profession she has carved out for herself with a lot of hard work, which has drifted from where it used to be and needs to be shunted back to that right path. A love of numbers.

And, naturally, it's all about a love of Austen. Jane is vital to the book – but the book isn't about her. She is like sunlight and water to a neglected garden, causing things to happen.

The Austen Escape has a number of points in common with a book I read a few years ago, Austenland. Both feature a semi-immersive Jane Austen experience, in which guests dress the part from head to toe, put away their cell phones, and participate in Regency-style activities. But the ethics and advisability of Austenland struck me as deeply questionable, and it all left me with a bad taste in my mouth. This book was entirely different. I loved just about every character's arc, and found the whole thing very satisfying.

Life advice from The Austen Escape:
"He said that how people treat you is only 10 percent about you and 90 percent about them, so you need to be careful how you react and how you judge. You never know someone’s story."

"My grandfather used to say that everything in the world could be solved at the cadence of a cast. Think about things, don’t rush them, get a feel for them, live organically. Live life like you cast." He bent his arm again, and with fluid slow motion he shot the line straight across the pond into the slow-moving water near the far bank.

"Music is math, and once you understand that . . . How can anyone not be in awe? It’s the audible expression behind the laws of the universe. It feels like the only thing, apart from God, that lives outside time. Once released, it lives on and it can make you laugh and cry, rip you apart and heal you, all within a few discrete notes strung together. And while it follows rules, expression is limitless."

And this made me laugh out loud:

"How did they do all this?"
"When you went up for your bath, I watched from a window." I yanked at his hand. "Not you. This. I watched this."

The usual disclaimer: I received this book via Netgalley for review. show less

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 show more 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! show less

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 show more 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 show less

I have mentioned many a time that my book reading schedule is odd. I accept books for review and they go in my calendar and then I forget about them. I often have books back to back that are similar in topic or location and it amazes me since I could have scheduled them a month apart. The Austen Escape landed in the midst of some darker books so it was perfectly timed. I love when things work out that way.

Mary is an engineer in a not so start up company that is experiencing some growing pains. Her pet project is not popular with the new CEO and truth be told neither is she. Mary is fond of the consultant helping the owner of the company who is trying to transition to a new way of working. While all of this is going on at work Mary show more receives an exciting offer from her best friend from high school – a fully paid vacation at an estate in Bath, England, where the girls can immerse themselves in an Austen experience.

Why Austen? Well, her friend is an Austen expert and her deceased mother loved all of the books. Mary used to read them aloud to her as she was dying. So the memories for her are mixed. Her friend, Isabel was warmly welcomed into Mary’s family when her own practically abandoned her to the point that she considered Mary’s parents her own. This did lead to some jealousy between the girls.

The vacation offer though, comes at a great time for Mary as she needs to get away and think about what is happening in her life. But the trip does not turn out exactly as either girl thinks it will. Mary learns more about herself and Isabel than she might have wanted to.

I plowed through this book in an afternoon. It was – despite some unhappy moments – a quick, light and perfect read for sitting by the fire with a cup of tea. It is a romantic novel so boy and girl have to meet and then have their miscommunication or their wouldn’t be the push and pull that makes these types of books so much fun. And no, I’m not going to go in to who, what, why, when or where but just know the story is fun, the characters are sweet, the ending is resolved and you don’t have to overthink any of it. show less

This book is not like your typical Austen-style book. It doesn't try to be a modern version of any Austen classic; instead, it takes the Austen characters and analyzes them through the pretense of an Austen-themed costume weeklong getaway. I loved the concept behind it: strangers sign up to live in a manor that is set up in the Regency era, and each person chooses a character from Jane Austen's novels and pretends to be them for the duration of their stay. It's the kind of adventure I would want to do! I really loved Mary's character; she was one of the most realistic characters I have ever read about. The thoughts and feelings she has are ones I could relate to, and her actions make a lot of sense. She isn't overly dramatic and doesn't show more live in her own fantasy world; she is a quiet character who has her unique strengths and weaknesses. Mary was the kind of character I could envision as my friend because she was just so real! I also loved all of the other cast members of this novel, and how each played their part in telling this story. I thought that Isabel's memory loss could have been done better (it was a little wishywashy in its appearance and disappearance and just didn't have as strong of an explanation as I would have liked) but this did not detract from the novel's story. The romance was done very nicely in this novel; again, it was not too dramatic and the misconceptions that occurred here were ones that I could see happening in the real world. I guess what I loved about this book so much was that it was so realistic and plausible that I could easily fall into the story and believe in it. All in all, I had a great time reading this book and would give it a solid 4/5 stars!

I received this novel as an advance copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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