The Austen Affair is a fun time-traveling romance, perfect for fans of Jane Austen and Regency-era settings.

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The cover of The Austen Affair really caught my eye and the premise sounded so fun: two co-stars of a Northanger Abbey film adaptation accidentally time travel from the movie set back to the Regency era, where they must get over whatever it is they hate about each other in order to escape an unexpected fake engagement and get back to the present day.

The Austen Affair is as frothy as the petticoats beneath a Regency ball gown. As a fan of Austen adaptations myself, I thought it was fun to see Tess embrace the gift the universe gave her in zapping her back in time and revel in the era she finds herself in. Do we get a satisfactory explanation of how the electrocution time travels works? No. Does it matter? Not really. This is a light, fun romance. Although grief over the loss of a parent is a big theme and drives a lot of Tess’s transformation, it doesn’t feel heavy. The book touches a bit on the stifling role of women and their “honor” in the Regency era but again, not in a heavy way.

My problem with the book is that the romance didn’t really work for me. I didn’t see how after working together and clashing on set, Tess and Hugh would suddenly see something different in each other simply because of their forced proximity. It just felt a bit too neat (I was going to say too clean, but this is not a clean book). I can live with the anachronisms and unexplained time travel because the rest of the book started off so cute, but it’s hard to suspend disbelief when it comes to the romance at the heart of the story. Still, The Austen Affair is a fun, quick, and entertaining read and the author’s love of Jane Austen clearly shines through.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the ARC. All opinions are my own.