When a new landlord takes over and remnants of their father's business scandal force the three Woodward sisters out of their home and San Francisco tea shop, they find themselves landing in Austin of all places. Jane is having a hard enough time finding anything to like about Texas, with their inability to find a new location for their tea shop and her baby sister unhappy about leaving her friends, but her older sister Celia hurting from a break-up--and refusing to talk for the first time in their lives--is the worst. But then, they have an encounter with a heroic and chivalric Texan, and Jane just might have found one thing to like about the state . . .I'd like to think that just because a novel is related to Jane Austen's work, I wouldn't automatically pick it up--but that has yet to be proved. Perhaps I might have been able to resist, but there is that huge focus on tea and baking . . . and I love tea. So there it is.
Lodge takes a different tack from the average Jane Austen knockoff with the focus on Sense and Sensibility (as opposed to the more popular Pride and Prejudice). And it works really well; there's no Austen references in the text, but the story is undeniably a modernized Sense and Sensibility. I'm more of an Elinor than a Maryann, so I identified with the personality of Lodge's Celia more so than Jane, but Jane proved a bit more pragmatic than Austen's Maryann (even with her heightened 'sensibility'), and I enjoyed her sense of humor (not to mention all her baking and tea-making, though I cannot understand her love of chamomile).
I have to admit, one of the big draws to this book was that I knew it would have recipes in it--and one of my favorite recipes (a Moroccan tagine with couscous) came from another of the author's books. These look equally delicious. Other than a brief mention of seminary in the last chapters, there is absolutely no faith element, regarding which I was a little surprised and disappointed (especially considering the publisher), but on the other hand, the story is clean and entertaining. It is my favorite book by Lodge to date.
Thank you Blogging for Books for providing a free book to review. I was not required to write a positive review, and all opinions are my own.
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