While she bonds easily with her pretend brother, she finds herself nervous under the watchful gaze of the brooding Mr. With her two children spending the month with her ex and his mistress-turned-new-wife, Charlotte decides she’d like nothing better than to step into an Austen novel and make herself its heroine.Īt Pembrook Park, she becomes Charlotte Cordial, the widowed sister of the handsome and charming Edmund Grey. Charlotte Kinder still feels blindsided by her husband’s infidelity and their subsequent divorce, and in the midst of her friends setting her up on disastrous blind dates, she discovers the novels of Jane Austen. Shannon Hale’s Midnight in Austenland is the follow-up to Austenland, once again set at Pembrook Park in Kent, England - an exclusive vacation destination where guests adopt the manners, customs, and wardrobes of Regency England and experience a little romance with actors whose characters are reminiscent of the heroes from Jane Austen’s novels. She felt certain she was not in too much danger. It was okay to fall in love inside books and stories, and where was she if not inside a story? And wasn’t this why she’d come, after all? She felt certain she would be able to withdraw herself intact when the time came. And decided it was okay to let her heart flit and flutter around, and for her breath to get caught in her chest like the ghost’s flowing headdress on a shrub. I preferred the first Austenland to this one.She sighed. Charlotte has a breakthrough and her greatest moment of courage and strength when she is no longer the pushover “Nice Charlotte.” She becomes the bold and honest Charlotte and it lifts a weight off her heart freeing her emotional life within. The corny voices never leave and instead reveal a loneliness and a need for a trustworthy companion. She refers to the voices as her “Inner Thoughts.” She compares her experience to Jane Austen’s novels as being “much more intense in person than in a book, even if it was a game.” Her insecurities surface as she is continually playing two voices in her head that battle and bicker – even in the face of true danger, her mind wanders off into lengthy and ridiculous tangents.

During her stay, she jumps headlong and becomes obsessive about solving a mystery, however she is not quite sure if this mystery is real or if it is part of her Austenland experience.

This is a land for Austen fanatics to get lost in.Īctually, Charlotte is reeling from a divorce where she was betrayed by her husband and wants an experience that will trigger a reawakening of her hidden emotional life. Midnight in Austenland follows the 2007 Austenland but with a new main character traveling to England to spend two weeks in the fantasy of living immersed within what could be a Jane Austen novel – no outside amenities allowed.

Austenland book 2