Abandoned by Booklikes

I read this book as part of the Dead Writers Society's Genre Fiction Challenge for June 2016 and the Literary Birthday Challenge for 2016. At this point I am wishing I chose the other book for the genre challenge.

I don't know what to say here besides this entire book read as someone who seemed to think that Jane Austen was not that attractive, was bitter and angry that she was a spinster, and who apparently was jealous that her sister Catherine was away from her.

Shields really doesn't give you any insight into Jane Austen. She has a bunch of theories that are based on the books she wrote. For example, she says that Austen must have only loved bookish men because all of Jane Austen's heroes read books. Hell I remember reading Mansfield Park and I don't recall Edmund reading. I do remember how sanctimonious he was to Fanny though.

I really wish that Shields had stuck with a straight autobiography. Instead this whole book read like a very badly put together Buzzfeed article mixed with some references to Wikipedia.

I also really didn't like that the timelines were all over the place. Shields at times expects the reader to already know who people are at times and I got confused when she would retell certain people's biography again and again in the story (e.g. Austen's cousin Eliza is mentioned a lot in this book).

The writing is not much to write home about and I thought the flow was terrible. If the book had told a straightforward tale from Austen's birth to death that would have been something. Instead we jump around way too much.

I really don't know what else to say except that I found this book to be a complete waste of time and I only kept reading because I started to find it hilarious that if Shields saw that the color blue is mentioned in a story that must mean that Austen liked it.