Jane and The Year Without a Summer by Stephanie Barron – Blog Tour, Review

Today I’m pleased to be hosting a stop on the blog tour for the latest of Stephanie Barron’s ‘Being a Jane Austen Mystery’ series – Jane and the Year Without A Summer. I will share the blurb with you and then move on to my review of the book. Read on for more details.

Book Description 

May 1816: Jane Austen is feeling unwell, with an uneasy stomach, constant fatigue, rashes, fevers and aches. She attributes her poor condition to the stress of family burdens, which even the drafting of her latest manuscript—about a baronet's daughter nursing a broken heart for a daring naval captain—cannot alleviate. Her apothecary recommends a trial of the curative waters at Cheltenham Spa, in Gloucestershire. Jane decides to use some of the profits earned from her last novel, Emma, and treat herself to a period of rest and reflection at the spa, in the company of her sister, Cassandra.
 
Cheltenham Spa hardly turns out to be the relaxing sojourn Jane and Cassandra envisaged, however. It is immediately obvious that other boarders at the guest house where the Misses Austen are staying have come to Cheltenham with stresses of their own—some of them deadly. But perhaps with Jane’s interference a terrible crime might be prevented. Set during the Year without a Summer, when the eruption of Mount Tambora in the South Pacific caused a volcanic winter that shrouded the entire planet for sixteen months, this fourteenth installment in Stephanie Barron’s critically acclaimed series brings a forgotten moment of Regency history to life.

Jane and The Year Without a Summer by Stephanie Barron – My Review

Although this is a series of fourteen books I’ve actually only read the last three, including this one. Here are links to my reviews of book twelve - Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas and book thirteen - Jane and the Waterloo Map 

The ‘Being a Jane Austen Mystery’ series puts Jane Austen as a sleuth, intermingling fictional murder mysteries into her known real-life movements.

The first thing to know is that the year without a summer is not a bit of dramatic embellishment by the author but actually a real event; 1816 had a colder than usual summer globally, due to volcanic ash. There were crop failures due to the cold summer. Another thing to bear in mind with this novel is the timeline. Jane Austen died in July 1817, just over a year after this novel is set (May-June 1816, during a trip Austen took with her sister Cassandra, to Cheltenham Spa, as she had been feeling unwell with the disease that would eventually take her life). So in a way the incessant bad weather provides a sympathetic background as the reader knows that Austen is beginning to face her last days: 

I spoke with determined cheerfulness, for in all truth I have not been feeling very stout of late, and at my sister Cassandra’s urging had at last sought the advice of the Alton apothecary. Lassitude, a want of spirits, and a persistent pain in my back dogged me throughout the winter months.

At the spa, Jane will come to meet a mix of characters and get involved in a mystery. The characters that she meets are actually quite an unlikeable bunch! She will also become reacquainted with Mr Raphael West, an artist who has featured in the last few ‘Being a Jane Austen Mystery’ books. Surprisingly he was a real person, although I am not aware of him having known Miss Austen, much less having a friendship with her.

As for the mystery, I really enjoyed it. The pace is relatively slow but even and in keeping with a realistic course of events. Although I was pretty certain what had happened before the reveal, that wasn’t really the point of the exercise, I felt like I was enjoying the mystery along the way with Jane.

The big bonus with these books is that they are told in Jane’s voice and I really enjoyed Ms Barron’s take on her character. She is humorous, self-deprecating and very sharp; I loved Jane’s ‘voice’.

There were nods in some of the text to Austen’s works. Some of these worked better than others for me. There is some wording used which came from Austen’s books which were published at this time and in some cases didn’t feel natural, but there were some resemblances to some of her characters which I enjoyed. In one of the previous books in the series I thought that Austen’s sister in law Mary bore a strong resemblance to Mary Musgrove from Persuasion. In this book Jane’s brother James could have been the model for Mr Collins from Pride & Prejudice:

 

“I blame my father—may he rest in peace, poor soul. He ought never to have encouraged your writing; the female mind is too weak to support the rigors of composition, and must necessarily fall into vice.”

“I apprehend you have been composing your sermon, James.” I beamed at him with unruffled serenity.

 This episode of the series was a little bit melancholy, which was inevitable as the reader knows that Jane’s time is running out. On the flip side many of the characters were quite unlikeable, so I didn’t mind the bad things happening to them so much – if I’d have liked them more I might have struggled, so I thought the balance was good!

One thing I really appreciated were the notes added in by the author to highlight things which were facts. I love learning history through stories but sometimes you can’t tell what is fact and what is fiction, so having the facts highlighted for me saves me looking it up later!

There appears to be scope for at least one more book, which is another sad thought, because I like this series. I’d recommend reading Jane and the Year Without a Summer if you enjoy mysteries and Jane Austen as a character. Although it’s part of a series you could read it as stand alone with few difficulties. This is my favourite one I’ve read so far and I’ll rate it as a 5 star read.

Author Bio

Francine Mathews was born in Binghamton, New York, the last of six girls. She attended Princeton and Stanford Universities, where she studied history, before going on to work as an intelligence analyst at the CIA. She wrote her first book in 1992 and left the Agency a year later. Since then, she has written twenty-five books, including five novels in the Merry Folger series (Death in the Off-Season, Death in Rough Water, Death in a Mood Indigo, Death in a Cold Hard Light, and Death on Nantucket) as well as the nationally bestselling Being a Jane Austen mystery series, which she writes under the penname, Stephanie Barron. She lives and works in Denver, Colorado.

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Buy Links

Jane and the Year Without a Summer is available to buy now in hardback and kindle. I understand this title will also be available in audio.

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