The Austen Escape

September 11, 2017
Reay (A Portrait of Emily Price) adds to the ever-expanding genre of Jane Austen–themed literature with her latest offering. Mary Davies, an industrial engineer from Texas, has been working on augmented reality glasses for years but her work has been for naught and she has been downgraded to working on batteries. She is also secretly enamored with Nathan Hillam, a consultant working at her engineering firm who will soon be moving on to his next assignment. Her father convinces her to leave it all temporarily behind and head to Bath, England, with her emotionally fragile best friend, Isabel Dwyer. There they will immerse themselves in Austen escapism for two weeks so that Isabel can do research for her doctoral dissertation. Mary and Isabel dress up in Regency clothes and act as characters from Austen’s books, and then things quickly get complicated: Isabel suffers memory loss and believes she really is part of the past. In this world of grown-up make-believe, Mary will discover much more than she ever expected about both Isabel and herself, including that Nathan is an important part of both their lives. When he hurries to Bath to help them both, will Mary make her feelings known? Unlike many books written in homage to Austen, this is not a modern retelling of any of her stories, but rather a romp among contemporary Austen fanatics. Readers eager for anything Austen-related will enjoy this clean romance that explores the concept of escapism and what it may reveal about our real lives.

October 1, 2017
An engineer at a crossroads gains clarity about her past and information about her future on a Jane Austen-themed vacation in Bath, England.Mary Davies is stymied in her professional and personal lives, which happen to be intertwined. A creative engineer at a tech hardware firm in Austin, Texas, she has failed to bring her most beloved project to fruition, calling her employment into question with the new boss. Though she receives encouragement and telling bits of attention from the interim CEO, Nathan, she insists that her project and obvious love for him are both dead in the water. The novel veers in a different direction, then, as Mary accompanies her childhood best friend, Isabel, on an immersive vacation at a manor house in Bath, where they dress in period garb, take on the personae of their chosen Austen characters, and mingle with other guests. The action in Bath is layered. Isabel suffers a kind of mental breakdown, retreating fully into her character, frightened by anything that threatens the fantasy. This sheds light, in intermittent beams, on the women's troubled friendship, suggesting a reason for Mary's defeatism. Nathan, learning of the situation, hops on a plane to England to provide assistance. Mary is slowly convinced of his love for her but is as easily spooked by this new development as Isabel is of cellphones. Meanwhile, her employment--and related self-esteem--hangs in the balance. Reay handles the Bath scenes with tenderness and a light touch, allowing the drama to come as much from internal conflict as external, rom-com-type misunderstandings. But while it's laudable to put a woman in science at the center of a Regency romance, Mary's professional life still feels forced.Thoughtful escapism.

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