Reviews of I Was Jane Austen's Best Friend

 

MACMILLAN
24/12/09

I Was Jane Austen’s Best Friend is a wonderful and original way to introduce younger generations to Jane Austen’s life and work. Even more poignant perhaps is the fact that the foundations of this story are real.

Author Cora Harrison, who specialises in children’s historical fiction, has researched the characters for her book in such a way that it provides invaluable insight into the life of the wild, witty, imaginative young girl Jane Austen was.

We see the young author through the eyes of her shy cousin, Jenny Cooper, who comes to stay for the summer. And that summer will change her life forever, because above all else this book is a romance, and one that echoes those that we will know and love from Jane Austen’s work in the years to come.

Waterstones's Books Quarterly review.

 

Illustrated with delightful and informative pen and ink images, this is a recreation of the home life of the fifteen-year-old Jane Austen, seen through the fictional diary entries of her cousin Jane (Jenny) Cooper.

The people and places in this account are real, based on what is known of Austen’s adolescence, and Harrison has made good use of her own love of Austen’s novels and characters, imagining them to be fictional accounts of family and friends.

Late eighteenth and twenty-first-century literary styles are well combined, and lively characterisation provides an engaging text which creates a typical Austen short novel around Jenny’s whirlwind romance.

Harrison also addresses the plight of George, Jane’s brother, and attitudes of the time towards learning difficulties and physical disability.

Booktrust, November 2009

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Reviews of The Burren murder series

With her superb attention to detail, Cora Harrison brings medieval Ireland into vivid life, being equally skilful at portraying the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Mara is up there with the great fictional detectives.   - Historical Novel Society, Editors' Choice Titles for August 2009

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