by Alistair Moffat
Sourcebooks Inc., $9.99, 61 pages

About the size and shape of a book for young readers, The Jane Austen Companion to Love is a picture book for the Austen lover. Filled with quotes from the books and letters written by the famous English author, the words of Miss Austen come alive yet again to a new generation of readers. The accompanying high-quality watercolors add great visuals to the quotes, which are short enough for even the wildest Twitter fiend to read and of a quality and humor that long-standing Austen fans will love.

The only shortcoming of the book is while quotes abound, the book seems poorly put together in that tidbits about Austen’s life and times appear sporadically and without much thought as to guiding the reader through her life or linking the quotes together beyond the obvious theme of love and marriage. It would have been greatly improved by having some arc to give it an obvious beginning, middle, and end. The few pages that did devote time to Austen’s life were wonderful and a few more of those types of entries, her love for an unnamed man by the seaside for example, would have been a fantastic inclusion in this volume.

Reviewed by Axie Barclay