Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict [Paperback]

Is there always another chance at happiness? Are we bound to our past, or do "we all have the power to create heaven on earth, right here, right now?" Important questions heroine Jane Mansfield must come to acknowledge and understand in Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, Laurie Viera Rigler's parallel story to her best selling novel, Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict.

This time around, it is Jane Mansfield a gentleman's daughter from 1813 who is transported into the body of twenty-first century Los Angelean Courtney Stone. Jane awakens with a headache, but it will take more than aromatic vinegar to solve her problems. Where is she? Her surroundings are wholly unfamiliar to the usual comforts of her parent's palatial Manor house in Somerset. Is she dreaming? She remembers a tumble off her horse Belle, but nothing after that point. She looks in the mirror and the face reflected back is not her own. How can this be? A young man named Wes arrives who calls her Courtney. Is he a servant? Who is Courtney? Ladies arrive for a visit concerned by her odd behavior. Why is she acting like a character in a Jane Austen novel?

Jane is indeed a stranger in a strange land. As her friends, or Courtney's friends Paula, Anna and Wes, help her navigate through the technology of cell phones, CD players, washing machines and other trappings of our modern life it becomes les taxing. She relishes her privacy and independence to do as she chooses, indulging in reading the four new (to her) novels by Jane Austen that she discovers on Courtney's bookshelf - one passion/addiction that she shares in common with her over the centuries. Between Jane Austen's keen insights and the fortune teller called "the lady", she might be able to make sense of this nonsensical world she has been thrown into. Is this the same fortune teller she met in Bath in her own life? She had warned her not to ride her horse. Or did she? Are her memories and Courtney's one in the same? The lady tells her she has work to do to put Courtney's life in order. Jane only wants to return to her former life and Charles Edgeworth, the estranged beau she left behind.

Seeing our modern world from Jane's nineteenth century eyes was quite revealing. I do not think that I will ever look at a television screen again without remembering her first reaction to the glass box with tiny people inside talking and dancing like characters from Pride and Prejudice! These quirky insights are what Rigler excels at, and her Regency era research and knowledge of Jane Austen plays out beautifully. We truly understand Jane's reactions and sympathize with her frustrations. Not only is Rude Awakenings a comedy of lifestyle comparisons across the centuries, it supplies a very interesting look at modern courtship and romance with a bit of genteel feminisms thrown in for good measure. Interestingly, what principals and standards that Jane learned in the nineteenth century, will straighten out Courtney's mixed up twenty-first century life at home, work and in her budding romance with Wes.

Rude Awakenings is a cheeky comedy with a message. Like Jane Austen's novel Persuasion, it helps us to look at mistakes in our past, and reminds us that "time is fleeting, and few of us are fortunate enough to notice that there is always another chance at happiness." I enjoyed the humor, fondly remembering why I became a Jane Austen Addict in the first place.

Laurel Ann, Austenprose

"Today's women are no less desirous of love, and marrying for love, than they were in your time. But they, like so many women before them, simply fear it is an unattainable goal. And thus they settle for what fleeting plasures they can find, creating an endless cycle of pleasure, despair, ad infinitum. Human nature is the same today as it was in your time. The only difference between today's world and your world is that people have more choices now than they did then." ( RUDE AWAKENINGS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT, p.265)
This is my first Austen-based book, never read one before, only the original novels by Jane. So I'm not an expert of the genre. RUDE AWAKENINGS is the sequel of Laurie's first novel, CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT, which I didn' t read. What was this first experience like? Great pure amusement which reminded me the same kind of hilarious reaction I had after skeptically approaching LOST IN AUSTEN when the DVD got to me last September (or was it October?). I mean, I studied Jane Austen's novels at university after reading some of them (only P & P and S & S) in my adolescence and that brought me to read them ( and every other novel ) professionally, because of my job (teaching literature). This is why I was rather skeptical toward Austen based fiction or adaptations. So, in order to read this novel for the challenge, I had to go back to the time I use to read just for fun day and night and leave apart the "professional tools". Anyway, I was truly involved in the narration of the story, since Laurie knows Austen quite well and it is a pleasure to recognize that background while smiling at the entertaining series of misunderstandings, blunders, weird situations her time - travelling protagonist, JANE MANSFIELD, finds herself involved in . Jane wakes suddenly up in 2009 in Los Angeles but she is an English girl living in 1813, fondly in love with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics). She is completely misplaced and shocked, her body even is a stranger's one: she looks at herself in the mirror and sees a nice blondie everybody calls Courtney Stone!
Reading this novel I thought of LOST IN AUSTEN many times. There are many analogies between the stories, though I think CONFESSIONS has got more : In Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, a twenty-first-century Austen fan Courtney Stone awakens one morning in 1813 England as a gentleman's daughter, Jane Mansfield--with comic and romantic consequences. In RUDE AWAKENINGS as I told you, Jane, the gentleman's daughter from 1813 England, finds herself occupying the body of Courtney in the urban madness of twenty-first-century L.A. Since in LOST IN AUSTEN an Austen fan, Amanda Price (Jemima Rooper in the photo on the left) swaps her life with Elizabeth Bennet, the protagonist of her favourite novel...I think it is obvious that I was always drawing comparisons while reading.
Have you seen LOST IN AUSTEN? It's such fun!
Lost In Austen [DVD] [2008]I know many academic would turn up their noses at this kind of readings or TV series but I am convinced that reading as well as studying literature must be a pleasure. This is my philosophy even when I teach Austen or Dickens or Shakespeare to my students: they must contrast and compare those stories to their own experience and amuse themselves as much as they can. Not always an easy task, mine!

The idea is fascinating: a woman from Jane Austen's time wakes up in 2009. How would modern life look to her? Would she be able to adjust? Laurie Viera Rigler's exploration of these themes is enjoyable, but at the same time a little disappointing. If you're going to write a pastiche of Jane Austen at least make it a good pastiche. This wasn't. When the heroine, Jane Mansfield, wakes up in the 21st century and finds a digital clock blinking at her, she thinks "What is this wondrous thing?" Wondrous? That doesn't sound like a word you'd find in a Jane Austen novel, and three minutes with an online concordance are enough to show that it isn't. Evidently the author chose it because it sounded vaguely archaic, without any awareness that it does not catch the flavour of Jane Austen's speech.
She also slips up on historical detail. That "wondrous" digital clock wakes her with a piercing sound like a ship's horn - but surely ships' horns weren't invented until the age of steam. This may sound like nit-picking, but to me these are not minor slips, but glaring proof that the author has little understanding or genuine feeling for the period she claims to love
Having said this, I think she does a good job of showing modern life through the eyes of a young woman from 1813. Jane learns to use a DVD player, a computer, a phone, and begins to relax her rigid standards on matters of dress, class, and behaviour.
It took me some time to realise that this book was the second of two, and that I should have started with "Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict". However, that didn't matter - the story stands well enough by itself. While I found the style disappointing, the idea in itself was intriguing enough to make me want to read the first book as well. But what struck me on finishing the two was that there were a number of loose ends which didn't tie up. Jane finds an album in Courtney's 21st century apartment with drawings of herself done by Courtney. But when did Courtney return to modern life to do these drawings? Similarly, Courtney is shocked to find a journal in Jane's 19th century room with "Courtney Stone" written on one of the empty pages. Even more surprisingly, the footman James reminisces how she used to tell him stories about "the black lady who refused to give up her seat in the coach to the white gentleman who demanded it": i.e. Rosa Parks. When exactly were these things supposed to have happened?
One of the pleasures of a good time travel story should be going over the plot afterwards and working out how all the pieces fit in. Unfortunately the author was not clever enough at constructing her plot, which quite simply doesn't fit together.
In conclusion, then, I found this book intriguing enough to buy the one I had missed. At the same time, I felt that both books could have been so much better.