Jane Bites Back by Micheal Thomas Ford

Jane Bites Back by Micheal Thomas Ford
Ballantine Books, 2010.  299 pgs.

 Ok, so I meant to write this post prior to February 1st.  Why, you might ask?  Because SQUEEEEEEEAAAALLLLLLL--the sequel to Jane Bites Back, Jane Goes Batty came out!  By the loud squeal, you can surmise my thoughts about Jane Bites Back.  :)

Here's the plot:  Jane Austen is 'alive' and well.  'Cept she's a vampire.  She owns a bookstore in upstate New York and has a trusty assistant named Lucy.  She's not a big fan of the whole drinking blood thing.  She only doesn't it when she needs to and doesn't kill.  She's been continually revising and attempted to publish the manuscript that she was working on when she 'died'. And finally--a publisher accepts the novel and suddenly Jane is in the limelight, trying to hide her real identity.

This book works, and not because I am a big fan of the mashup genre--vampires, zombies, werewolves--Oh My!   Because the thing is, I'm truly not the biggest fan of them.  But this book worked for me.  Here's why:

• It's funny.  I was laughing out loud while reading it and that's a rare treat.  
• There are other literary characters in it that add to the hijinks (Lord Byran, Chartlotte Bronte).  If you have read Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair, I'm thinking you can appreciate this one, too. 
• She's a got a sassy assistant, Lucy, who orders literary finger puppets for the bookstore and takes the whole vampire thing in stride, but gets a little crazed at her actually being Jane Austen--"You. Are. Jane. Austen....Your Jane freaking Austen!"
• And Lucy is just one of the many lovable characters in the novel!

So, with that, I SQUEEEEAAALLLL again! I have a bit of dough left on a B&N gift card that would make it feel like I was getting Jane Goes Batty for half price (as if I need an excuse to buy a book, but it helps, right?).  Hmmm, maybe that wasn't a squeal but a squeak, like a bat squeak....Hmmm.  I'm batty for Jane Bites Back.

5 Bonnets out of 5.