I really enjoyed reading this book! The idea of someone who has grown up pretty much obsessed with Jane Austen, and for real life, in our time, not working out the same way, sounded really great! I had a great time reading Emma's story!

When Blake didn't want marriage, Emma was pretty distraught, that the ideals that she's loved aren't playing out like she wants them to. So I can understand leaving them behind. But oh, that really is too bad! Maybe they just need to be simplified, so they can change and grow with the times.

That she's falling in love with Lucas, Blake's brother, makes the situation even more complicated, with Blake trying to get her back. I had such a blast watching as she dealt with her feelings for both the brothers and for romance in general, especially since Lucas is falling for her as well, but he doesn't want to hurt his brother. Complications galore!

Really, this was a sweet story of someone wrestling with her idea of romance taught to her by Jane Austen, and what she wants out of life, and I had a great time seeing her make the decisions that were best for her and her life!

Loved reading this book and I'm so glad that I read it!

Why did it take me so long to read this delightful book? A fun contemporary story about a smart professional woman with her own past whose relationship is on the rocks as she discovers more about herself and who she really loves.

Fully enjoyable. I read it too fast.

A well crafted and well paced read, however it was not one I was able to connect with fully. Am extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to read and review this story.

This book is an absolute delight from start to finish. Emma is fantastic. She is funny, spunky and very smart. I loved her inner conflict with “Jane” and whether or not Jane Austen has ruined her life. Very cute and clever. I thought the chapter headings were a great addition to the story too. I also loved Lucas and he and Emma had great chemistry. I enjoyed how they got to know each other, pretty much thrown together, as Lucas is hired as a consultant at Emma’s workplace. Emma and Lucas both had challenging childhoods but they both became amazing adults. Towards the end, I thought the addition of April was lovely and how Emma learned a lot about herself and her relationship with Blake. Lucas and Blake’s mother was also a favorite. The epilogue is absolutely perfect and fits so well with the story.

This book is so great! I love Jane Austen, and I love the way this book was written. Each and every chapter has a quote from a Jane Austen book that goes along with what happens in each chapter.

I love Emma in this book! I love that you see the story from her perspective and she is the ultimate Jane Austen fan, along with her best friend, or adopted sister, Silvia. Emma is usually watching a swoon worthy Jane Austen movie, or pulling out her well worn copy of Pride and Prejudice that she always has with her. But Emma eventually decides that love is not real and that Jane Austen has been telling the world lies about how things really are for hundreds of years, and everything bad that happens to Emma becomes all Jane’s fault. I kind of love how real Jane Austen and her works were to Emma. Real enough that Emma was pretty furious with her. But I love the way Silvia eventually helps her to see that she’s wrong about Jane.

This book opens with Emma surprising her boyfriend, Blake, at his family’s home in San Diego. This scene is so funny, because he didn’t plan on her coming and has already invited another woman over. Okay, it wasn’t funny for Emma, especially since the people at her work have convinced her that he’s planning to ask her to marry him. But it was comical how she meets Blake’s brother Lucas.

And Lucas, he’s amazing! He’s a gentleman, and it’s really comical when he shows up as a new co-worker for Emma. I love that scene! Emma mistakenly thinks something about Lucas that just isn’t true, and that causes problems for the two later in the book. And Lucas has an aggravating habit of continually trying to get Blake and Emma back together, it’s really annoying when it’s so obvious that Emma is falling hard for Lucas.

This book is full of ups and downs, twists and turns that I never saw coming. It kept me wanting to read more and more. Even after I finished it, I loved it so much I just want to read it again…over and over, much like I have Jane Austen’s books!

Ever since Emma first read Pride and Prejudice, she has based all her romantic ideals on Austen and her advice and quotes. However, when she decides to do something spontaneous, and turns up to her boyfriend Blake's parent's house and sees him there with another girl Trish the fish. She decides it is time to break up with Jane Austen as she has been steered too many times in the wrong direction. Leaving Blake's, Emma realizes she is slightly stranded and ends up getting a ride to the train station with Blake's brother Luke Hampton. Weekend over and back at work, imagine Emma's surprise when her boss brings in the new consultant she will be working closely with aka Luke Hampton. As the book goes along, we see that Luke is Emma's perfect match but what will happen when Blake tries to win Emma back and Luke starts to back off as he doesn't want to get in between his brother's happiness, even if it means sacrificing himself. Now Emma must let Jane Austen go and take her love life in her hands and let Blake go and tell Luke just how she feels. Will Emma be able to sort her love life out without the help of Austen? Find out in this fun love triangle chick-lit novel "Lies Jane Austen Told Me" by Julie Wright. Perfect for any Austenite out there.

I disliked this one pretty much from the start. I felt I couldn’t really relate to Emma at all. Also I feel like the whole modern Jane Austen has kind of been overdone lately. Definitely room for improvement and honestly wouldn’t recommend it.

I think technically I would give this 3 1/2. I had a hard time getting behind this book. The summary sounded good, but from start to finish, I read three other books in between. The main character Emma, was a little on the boring side with her constant inner monologue of “I’m in love with him but he doesn’t love me” thing. The story was an interesting idea I just think the characters and plot could have used some tweaking. I think my favorite character was her friend Silvia. If you like Jane Austen, this book is worth a look see.

I was initially interested in reading this book, however my tastes have shifted and I do not think I will be able to get to it now. Many thanks to the publisher for sending me a digital copy!

This is your typical love story filled with twists and turn along the way. There are lots of likeable characters in the story all providing their own funny and rememberable moments. If you like a quick, feel good romantic read then this one is definitely for you.

I wanted to like this book more but sadly, I just didn't. It was sort of like a Hallmark-esque movie of a book, but not one of the so-cheesy-and-eye-rolling-it's-good Hallmark-esque movies, like A Christmas Prince; this was one of the duds you watch thinking it'll be like that but actually it's not well-written or acted and it's just makes you roll your eyes for all the wrong reasons.

Sigh. This really should have had all the elements of a good fit for me: a modern woman who super loves Jane Austen-check, some drama in the romance department-check, possible romantic intrigue that could filter into her working life-check. But instead it seemed to fall prey to a lot of romance and chick-lit tropes that either need serious updating or need to die a quick death. From the misunderstanding which ruins any hope for a future relationship (which was seriously stretched in this book as the misunderstanding was based on Emma jumping to the most obvious conclusion and while, yes she should've asked Lucas about the whole April and Denise situation much earlier on than she did after they started having to work together and got to be friendly, there was no reason for him to get so wildly overblown upset with her about misjudging him and not intuiting that Denise was his sister and not his ex when she had no way of knowing he even had a sister. Why would that be her first assumption? Also given how much he shared about his life before he was adopted by the Hamptons WHY DID HE NEVER MENTION HE HAD A SISTER BEFORE?!!! It was just dumb and contrived and ugh, I wanted to slap everybody. Sylvia was the only voice of reason throughout most of the book and even she was occasionally a little eye-roll inducing (also what was going on with her side-story because it totally felt like there was some romantic subplot issue of her own but it never got address and only vaguely hinted at and it seemed like eventually Emma would get Sylvia to open up about it but then nothing even came of all of that foreshadowing. It was weird and awkwardly done. All we got was a mention of a date later in the epilogue. I thought maybe there would be some thing about her possibly having a failed romance with her former boss who helped her get the job at lion's gate but nada. So weird).

I will say one of the bright spots of the book was that Blake turned out to not be a total tool like I assumed from the beginning. He was a little self-absorbed and competitive and a little bit of an idiot and had some possessive tendencies (but not in a stalkery way) but in a flawed, human way, and in the end he was still a nice person who hadn't really been the terrible cheating scoundrel Emma thought he was; he just wasn't the right guy for her. That was a refreshing change from the norm in romances like this. It was still a little weird to have her fall for his brother (at least weird for me because idk if I could get over the fact--if I were Lucas--that she and Blake used to bone despite all the warm fuzzies and whatnot. It would just be kind creepy to me. But whatevs, that's a relatively minor complaint in the grand scheme of things).

Other annoyances were how some of the issues at her work were never resolved. Sure we resolved the whole thing with Debbie posting that pic of her and Lucas at Time's Square and tagging them (seriously that was ri-damn-diculously dumb of Debbie. Why would she think that would go over okay with anybody? That made no sense whatsoever. And Emma's comeback to her--"Why did you unfriend me in real life?" ugh that was terrible), but what about all the weird stuff with Jared devaluing Emma's work and straight up passing the credit to Lucas all the time (and Lucas kinda being a jerk and not really setting him straight immediately. Sure he was so "surprised" when it happened again at that working lunch...but dude, really? Get over being surprised and call the dude out. You don't have much to lose. You're a consultant who's only there for a few months. She's actually invested in the job. Do the right thing). All we got by the end was that Lucas was leaving at the end of his contract because they didn't want things to look weird since they're engaged now (it didn't look weird in the interim that y'all have been dating and got engaged...pretty quickly I might add because I'm guessing it's just been a few months but okay, cool, it's a book, whatever, but it didn't seem weird or HR-squicky before now? Sure sure, that scans *sarcasm*). It makes me wonder if she's still having trouble with Jared devaluing her work or trying to pass the credit to somebody else...possibly a dudebro he's friends with.

And while I appreciate Emma trying to call herself out for judging people, especially Lucas's sort of girlfriend Stephanie because she knows she probably doesn't like Stephanie because she's jealous...ugh to the petty mean girl trope ish. I didn't like Stephanie much either by the end of the book, but I'm pretty sure that was mostly because she wasn't written to be likable; she was written to be a cardboard cutout of a character that got disposed of when Emma and Lucas finally made their big declarations and everything got the HEA. And look, what a shocker, I was right. It might have been a good idea to have some hint that Stephanie even existed before such a late stage in the book but eh, I didn't care that much. It was just a bit annoying every time Emma got pissy about Stephanie and then got mad at herself for being pissy. I could've done without the whole thing, frankly.

Overall, this book had all the elements of a good romance/chick lit contemporary and I really wish I had enjoyed it more than I did. It picked up a lot better towards the end so that was nice, but it felt like it slogged quite a bit before then. It also felt like it could've done with a few more edits and some excising of tired old tropes to make it less cliche and cringe-worthy and to make it a tighter story overall. Some of the characters' motivations didn't always make the most sense, and occasionally it felt like there were some dropped plots which is always a bit annoying once you get to the end of a book, especially one that doesn't feel like the setup for a series. It was okay overall, but not the fun romantic romp I was really hoping for. Alas. Maybe I should go read Persuasion or Northanger Abbey instead.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me early access to this book in exchange for an honest review (maybe a little too honest? Sorry not sorry. Can't like 'em all).

A nice novel in between others. Nothing too special. A storyline many others picked up before. I did not see anything special in it but it was nice to read.

I thought I would enjoy this title a lot based on the description and because I enjoy most of the titles from the publisher. I could not get into it enough to finish it. I found the characters lacked dimension and didn't engage me. I couldn't begin to care enough about the love triangle. It just didn't work for me at all.

This book was featured on my blog in September 2017:

https://sonyaheaneyblog.com/2017/09/07/travel-reads-5/

And will be featured again in September 2018.

The more I consider what to write for this review, the more I start to think the book has hidden depths. I started off thinking the novel would be the same as every other romance based on Austen, but now I'm wondered if the author deliberately tricked me. Was she making me the 'Emma' of the novel, with my judgements and snobbery? Was I filled with pride and prejudice? If this was intentional, then that's clever. The ending gave me more Austen than the beginning which starts to have more of a flavour of fifty shades than anything with any sensibility. I did enjoy the Austen references and was glad some of the characters were not as two dimensional as they first appeared.

Cute contemporary romance. Slow to start with an initial conflict I really didn't like. I kept going and it was enjoyable, though not my favorite. A few too many assumptions that could have been cleared up with a single conversation to be a top pick for me.
3.5 stars

I just couldn’t get into this one. The storyline was dry and the characters constantly annoyed me. The writing itself had multiple typos and iffy grammar.

Emma has been in love with Mr. Darcy ever since she read Pride and Prejudice. When the man she thought to be her Mr. Darcy turns out to be more like George Wickham, her whole world is shaken. However, there may be more to her brother than he seems.
As a huge fan of Pride and Prejudice, I had to give this a try. I’ve read some hits and some misses when it comes to other authors, but am always willing to try a new author. This one was kind of in the middle for me. At different times, the characters were a bit annoying misunderstandings just went on a bit long for me. Overall, not a bad book. I would like to try more books from this author.
**I voluntarily read and reviewed this book

Well written and an enjoyable story. I really enjoyed reading this book and look forward to reading more by this author.

I ADORED this book! It was sweet and beautiful and had some amazing messages. The characters were flawed just enough to be believable, but not so much they depressed me. This was a sweet and clean romance, I'd rate it PG.