Book 932: Young Jane Austen – Lisa Pliscou

I picked this up back in 2016 and it’s languished on my TBR Austen/Brontë shelf ever since. It came up on my random book generator spreadsheet when I was packing books for our vacation back in February but it was the last one on the list and it kept getting delayed.

So FINALLY I made myself read wedge it in between ARCs this month and realized I should’ve read it weeks ago because it could easily be read in one sitting.

The best thing I can say about this book is that it’s a beautiful book. The illustration, packaging, and overall appearance are so well done. Unfortunately, they don’t make up for the rest of the book. Pliscou was very upfront about the lack of source material and how much speculation she was doing, but in the end, I was still annoyed.

The fact that she took what little is factually known about Austen’s childhood and dragged it out into a 180ish page book says something about her talents as an author. I really think she should’ve leaned into the picture book side of things (to match the writing style) and had this more as an intro/primer to Jane Austen rather than a book about her childhood written to what felt like children.

Outside of the lack of information and the overwhelming speculation, the thing that bothered me most was that the subtitle of the book is “Becoming a Writer” and the book STOPS cold before Austen started to become a writer. Pliscou decided to stop when Austen turned 12, so it was legitimately just a speculative recap of her first 12 years told from what felt like Austen’s perspective, but then there was very little if anything about reading and writing when we know Austen was prolific in her Juvenalia and I think Pliscou missed out on so many opportunities stopping before she really even started writing.

Recommendation: Only read the middle section (annotated version). This annoyed me more than it made me excited and it’s sad because Mongiardo’s illustrations are great and Pliscou is a decent author, but I really feel they should’ve leaned more into the picture book or only done the text version. Pliscou was open about how much of this was imagination and extrapolation, but you don’t realize exactly how much until you’re reading the annotated version with snippets (like so few words) from original sources. Having read so many other Austen biographies, this just felt woefully underwritten and I feel would’ve been better as a children’s picture book introducing Jane Austen to people.