It's hard to rate an unfinished work, but given what we have, I can say I would have thoroughly enjoyed this particular novel by Jane Austen.

(And I'm so glad that there will be a second season of the television series inspired by this unfinished book!) ( )

I'm very surprised by how much I loved this. I'd been avoiding it for ages, since it's unfinished, and I thought I'd be disappointed. Not a bit—sure, I'd rather there was more, but it would have been like not eating the free appetizer from Le Bernardin because you prefer an entire meal ... I'd been silly.

I try to explain to friends who say "Jane Austen? I'm not into those romance novels" that Austen is really a hilarious obvious of character, tucked into a romance format, but now I'm just going to hand them Sanditon, where there's no romance at all, but so much delicious prose commentary. She has everyone nailed, and the point-of-view is early-Victorian-bitchy, and it's wonderful. Take this about two fashionable young maidens, the Miss Beauforts:

They were very accomplished and very ignorant, their time being divided between such pursuits as might attract admiration, and those labours and expedients of dexterous ingenuity by which they could dress in a style much beyond what they ought to have afforded.

I'm sure I bumped into them yesterday.

It seems churlish to deduct a point because she died, so it's too short and lacks resolution, so I won't. This is top-notch writing at its finest.

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). I feel a lot of readers automatically render any book they enjoy 5, but I grade on a curve! ( )

This is a roughest of rough drafts and not particularly readable, in addition to being unfinished. I'm looking forward to be adaptation coming and it's JA, but otherwise forgettable and hard to focus on.

Summer reading: a book written before 1900. ( )

Great start to a story. You can see Austen's style shining through. ( )

As thanks for nursing his sprained ankle after a carriage topple, Mr. Tom Parker and his wife invite young country girl Charlotte Heywood to summer with them in Sanditon, a developing beach town that the Parkers are invested in (in more ways than one). Charlotte meets the rest of the Parker family - Tom's handsome brother Sidney and their hilariously hypochondriac sisters and brother - as well as the rich widowed financier of Sanditon, Lady Denholm, and the various relatives trying to get their hands on her fortune.

I read this along with watching the current PBS adaptation, because I was interested to compare the two and see how much of the show was directly from the original text and how much was new. This fragment has almost no plot - it's mostly just Charlotte hearing about people and then meeting them. But boy is it riotously funny! Charlotte is, to this point, fairly passive and mostly just observes the world around her. In true Austen heroine fashion she lets the buffoons around her speak for themselves. There are several scenes I would have loved to see in the tv show, such as one where hypochondriac Arthur Parker tells Charlotte that if he drinks any green tea his whole right side gets paralyzed for hours, and Charlotte tells him he should go see a doctor who specializes in right sides and green tea consumption. But I'll have to be content to merely read them here again.

It was an enjoyable read, though the very unedited nature of the draft took some getting used to - there are randomly capitalized words, abbreviations, and misspellings galore. My mind is still reeling to think of the many possible ways Austen could have taken this story. ( )