Of Time Travel and Zombies – Review: Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict and Pride & Prejudice & Zombies

As part of the Everything Austen challenge hosted by Stephanie’s Written Word I began the challenge with Pride and Prejudice. It was a good and logical book to begin with, a good refresher into Jane Austen’s prose.

The next two books I read are stories that Jane in her most creative day probably could not even have imagined, one sees the heroine traveling back in time to Jane Austen’s England, while the second involves zombie mayhem unleashed upon Elizabeth, Darcy and the rest of the beloved characters from Pride and Prejudice.

Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler begins with heartache. Courtney Stone has just learned her fiancé has cheated on her, so she has of course broken off the engagement. Obsessed with everything Austen (she is the Austen addict after all), following a particularly difficult evening wakes up not in her bed, in fact, not even in her body. She has assumed the body of Jane Mansfield, a twenty-something woman from Jane Austen’s England (not to be confused with Jayne Mansfield the 50s blond starlet). After the obvious initial confusion and then the fighting against her new identity, Courtney/Jane begins stretching her legs and exploring this land and time she has previously only read about. Courtney/Jane takes us to balls, trips to Bath, shopping in London – and of course describes the everyday life that we tend to forget about as we dream about pretty dresses and dashing gentleman.

Speaking of gentleman, there are plenty of them too. But as time goes on, will it be a gentleman from Jane’s life that Courtney will settle with as her own, or will she make it back home, and to the man she realizes she really loves?

I enjoyed reading this book. I liked being able to have the juxtaposition of the “olden times” presented from the mind of a modern woman. The converse of this story is in Rigler’s latest book Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict where we find Jane in our present day. I am looking forward to finally reading this one as well.

My mind gets time travel, as best you can “get” it. I have read enough books and seen enough movies that I wasn’t left asking any questions as I read. The same can’t be said about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. As I started reading it, I realized that I know nothing about zombies, I don’t think I have ever seen a zombie movie, and certainly have not read anything about zombies – vampires and werewolves, absolutely, but no zombies. OK, I know they want to eat brains, but why – to what end?! As I started reading I was also wondering what’s the big deal, zombies seem pretty easy to kill, being decomposed and all – I finally had to ask someone who told me it’s usually the amount of zombies that you would just get overwhelmed.

So, not knowing much about zombies I found this book fun, I don’t really know another way to describe it, and it is obviously not meant to be really compared to Pride and Prejudice. It made me giggle at times, I love that Lady Catherine was a zombie warrior and the illustrations in the book were very enjoyable too. I did also learn about zombies, sort of. Really, I think I would like a prequel to learn about zombies and how they “infected” England. But I’m glad I read it, and now of course am curious about Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters which comes out next week.

And not to be forgotten, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies also went towards another challenge I am in, the R.I.P. IV Challenge (which stands for Readers Imbibing Peril) hosted by Stainless Steel Droppings.