Title: The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen
Author: Syrie James
Genre: Mystery/Historical Fiction
Publisher: Penguin
Number of Pages: 432
Source: Netgalley
The minute I saw the letter, I knew it was hers. There was no mistaking it: the salutation, the tiny, precise handwriting, the date, the content itself, all confirmed its ancient status and authorship…
Samantha McDonough cannot believe her eyes--or her luck. Tucked in an uncut page of a two-hundred-year old poetry book is a letter she believes was written by Jane Austen, mentioning with regret a manuscript that "went missing at Greenbriar in Devonshire." Could there really be an undiscovered Jane Austen novel waiting to be found? Could anyone resist the temptation to go looking for it?
Making her way to the beautiful, centuries-old Greenbriar estate, Samantha finds it no easy task to sell its owner, the handsome yet uncompromising Anthony Whitaker, on her wild idea of searching for a lost Austen work--until she mentions its possible million dollar value.
After discovering the unattributed manuscript, Samantha and Anthony are immediately absorbed in the story of Rebecca Stanhope, daughter of a small town rector, who is about to encounter some bittersweet truths about life and love. As they continue to read the newly discovered tale from the past, a new one unfolds in the present--a story that just might change both of their lives forever.
When I saw this book on Netgalley it was instalove!! I love books about missing manuscripts. Throw in Jane Austen, and I was sold. However, I was really disappointed by this one.
I think that most Jane Austen fans will love this book. I was looking for a book about a quest, and this was not really that book. The manuscript is found pretty early on in the book, and it then becomes the story of the lost manuscript-a story within a story.
The writing was beautiful, and had I been in the mood for a historical fiction book and had the formatting from Netgalley not been so awful, I probably would have been able to finish the book. I'm not sure why but I have the worst luck with book formatting when I get them from netgalley. I can handle a sentence like
or two like this every now
and then
but throughout the course of the
book formatting like this
drives me cray-cray!!
For those of you who love Jane Austen like books, then I highly recommend this one, sadly this one was a dnf for me.
