Cashing in on Jane Austen’s recent popularity seems to be the name of the game in publishing. If Austen readers believe Fanny Price of Austen’s Mansfield Park is a socially shy mental case, poster child for the same sort of women, and want to read about an equally wussy heroine, this book will be a delight. I’m not one of them, however.

It’s hard to believe that Texan Lily Berry actually lives in the present time. When her boyfriend drops her, she becomes a stalker, wanting to know exactly why he dumped her. She also can’t reconcile her father’s wish to remarry after his wife’s death. For most of the book, I wanted Cher’s character in Moonstruck to slap her and yell, “Snap out of it!” as she did to Nicholas Cage.

To get away from the pain of her life, Lily insinuates herself at the half-hearted suggestion of her bookstore boss into a peripheral position at a Jane Austen literary festival in England even though she has not been promised a job and can’t afford to buy an airline ticket.

She does this with the approval of her own Jane Austen, a figment of her imagination that rules her life. She justifies seeing the apparition of Austen by saying that since she’s read all the novels, this is one of the side benefits. How appalled would Austen be to have to follow around someone as pathetic as Lily as her personal angel?

Arriving in England with the promise that she will have a part in a Literature Live presentation if another woman doesn’t show up and with a cross her mother made from her wedding band, Lily is slowly sucked into the festival’s turmoil. The organizers are busy trying to renew the lease for the estate where Literature Live takes place as the actors rehearse and everyone settles in for the summer.

Lily gets stuck with a roommate who “borrows” her necklace, loses it, and is completely apathetic as Lily implodes before her. So far there aren’t any likeable characters.

Even the guy Lily falls in love with, a theology student who’s become a recluse in the attic of the manor the Literature Live people are using, is pretty repellent. He’s engaged to another woman, but rather than writing his dissertation, getting his degree, and getting appointed to a congregation so he can get married, he’s writing a novel about a vampire priest and hanging out with Lily and her Jane Austen in a musty attic.

So the novel has a few peripheral similarities to Mansfield Park, but not many. Clouding the issue, however, is the character of Lily who is no Fanny Price and is so pathetic that I wondered if author Cindy Jones really read, or for that matter liked Mansfield Park. She references Austen scholarship, sometimes as a send-up, but mostly in the pretentious way authors who write books with study guides are wont to do.

If readers can get past Lily’s stalking, sulking, and bland personality, they might find a reason why trees were sacrificed for this book. If they can’t, like me, then they’ll wonder why this book was written other than to cash in on the Austen name.