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St. Petersburg Times – September 23, 2007 -- A
California girl in Jane Austen's days -- A case of time travel
reveals that not all was tea and crumpets. -- By Tammar Stein --
Into the recent Jane Austen melee of adaptations, biopics and all
around Austenmania, add another contender. Laurie Viera Rigler's
Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict takes the familiar arena of
Austen's empire-waist muslin, afternoon tea world and tweaks it in a
clever, cheeky way. Courtney Stone, a vodka-drinking, Jane
Austen-loving, thoroughly modern California girl, wakes up one day
to find herself living in a Jane Austen novel. Or rather, in the
world depicted so vividly in those books. Everyone in the household
refers to her as Jane Mansfield, and everything from her reflection
in the mirror to her handwriting belongs to this other...
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St. Louis Post-Dispatch – August 5, 2007 --
Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler --
Reviewed by Amy Woods Butler special to the Post-Dispatch -- Like
most chick-lit heroines, Courtney Stone obsesses over love, marriage
and calories. But unlike most, this amusingly neurotic 30-year-old
does it in an empire-waist gown, dancing a reel. In "Confessions of
a Jane Austen Addict," debut novelist Laurie Viera Rigler turns the
craze for all things Austen on its head by transplanting
21st-century Courtney into the body of an early 19th-century
Englishwoman. Shortly after breaking up with bad-boy fiancé Frank,
Courtney wakes up one morning in a strange bed attended by a doctor
dressed in what looks like "cast-offs from the Merchant-Ivory
costume department." The threat of being committed to an insane
asylum...
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USA Today – August 2, 2007 -- Authors Write for
the Love of Jane Austen -- by Deirdre Donohue -- After
discovering that her fiancé betrayed her with the woman designing
their wedding cake, a devastated Courtney Stone wakes up not in Los
Angeles but in a four-poster bed in 1813 England. A devotee of all
things Austen, she now discovers the reality of life in Regency
England: rampant body odor, sexual and class repression and a style
of medical care involving bloodletting. With a plot in two different
centuries, Addict is a bit disjointed, but Rigler does a perceptive
job in contrasting the different...
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Boston Herald – August 2, 2007 -- Authors take a
page from Austen’s powers -- By Sandra Kent -- The film
“Becoming Jane,” which opens Friday starring Anne Hathaway, is just
the tip of this year’s Jane Austen-orama. Here are a few notable
books to satisfy new and old fans of the literary lioness: The
recent paperback “Becoming Jane: The Wit and Wisdom of Jane Austen,”
edited by Anne Newgarden (Hyperion, $12.95),offers a collection of
Austen’s memorable quotes with biographical factoids. Topics range
from beauty and fashion to friendship, vanity, love and more. A
sample: “Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because
there is no hope of a cure.” - Mary Crawford to Fanny Price, in
“Mansfield Park.” “Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict,” (Dutton,
$24.96) is written by Laurie Viera Rigler, a member of the Jane
Austen Society of North America. She knows her Austen, and her
heroine Courtney Stone lives it. Stone’s in Los Angeles, nursing a
broken heart...
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The Times-Picayune – August 1, 2007 -- Austen has
her mojo back -- Taking off from -- and into -- the world of Jane
Austen -- By Susan Larson -- It is a truth universally
acknowledged -- or it ought to be -- that a reader possessed of a
goodly amount of time should be in want of a book. And for readers
who love -- and know -- their Jane Austen, this is a bounteous
summer and fall to come, with new film adaptations of her work, and
several amusing novels and nonfiction books inspired by her life and
work. It is truly possible to be lost in Austen these days. Those of
us who are dreamy romantics or sharp, thinking women or even hopeful
Darcys will no doubt return to the original six novels that inspired
our devotion. But beyond Austen's own words, here's a selection for
your reading pleasure: 'Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict,'
by Laura Viera Rigler (Dutton, $24.95), has the catchiest title...
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Booklist – June 19, 2007 -- Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict,
Laurie Viera Rigler. Dutton, $24.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-525-95040-0 -- Talk
about an out-of-body experience. One moment Courtney Stone is a
modern-day L.A. career woman lamenting a lost love; the next she is
Jane Mansfield, a well-to-do, willowy (though not particularly
buxom, unlike her twentieth-century namesake) lady in
nineteenth-century England. What could account for this transplant
of time and place? Courtney has no opportunity to ruminate over such
matters; she must quickly learn to interact with inhabitants of the
brave old world in which she finds herself. There’s her mother,
determined to marry 30-year-old Jane off to handsome...
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Publishers Weekly -- June 4, 2007 --
Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict -- Laurie Viera Rigler. Dutton,
$24.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-525-95040-0 -- A clever time-travel setup
functions as the prime attraction for this breezy debut novel.
Courtney Stone, a single Los Angeles woman recovering from the
double whammy of a broken engagement and a failed friendship, wakes
up after a night of self-medicating with her "drug of choice," Jane
Austen novels, to find herself in 1813 England. She's inhabiting the
body of Jane Mansfield, a manor-born Englishwoman who, at 30, has
yet to find a husband, confounding her humorless, "Miss
Bossy-corset" stand-in mother. While still haunted by "real-life"
memories, Courtney, as Jane, soon gets swept up in this Austenesque
world of decadent meals and grand balls, gentlemen in "form-fitting
knee breeches" and traveling...
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