Kestrel Klein has always been too much. Too much for her mother to manage or for any path in life to actually work out. Too much for her sweet Hank--the guy she thought was her soulmate, before he broke her heart. Itching for a big change, Kestrel enters a contest and wins a vacation to Pembrook Park, an immersive Austen experience. Bonus: it’s during Christmas, the one holiday where being too much is the whole point.

Once inside Austenland, Kestrel feels . . . dare she say, happy? Is it the cozy hearth fires warming her jaded heart? Is it the fun of gentlemen attempting to woo her under the mistletoe? Is it the instant friends who bring her into the fold? She's always worried that unless she can tamp down her too-muchness, she’ll never find that found family she craves. Just as Kestrel begins to let down her well-honed defenses, an unexpected visitor disrupts the holiday celebrations. Perhaps it’s the chance she needs to find out if her one true love really was meant to be. But now that she finally feels at home, is he still what she wants?

The third book in this utterly delightful series gives readers the chance to relish all the fun of Regency romance, from the comfort of their modern lives.

This pains me. This pains me greatly. Austenland was the first book I ever reviewed as a brand new baby book blogger 16 years ago, and I loved it. It’s one of my favorite books! Midnight in Austenland was also fun, but Christmas in Austenland is the one I expected to love the most! If you know me, you know I love Christmas. I was so, so excited to read this book that I jumped in the moment I downloaded it from Edelweiss. But… my goodness, it’s terrible. I ended up DNFing it at 15%. I normally don’t write DNF reviews, but I wanted to in this case because I had such a strong reaction to it and wanted to warn people who might have been just as excited as I was. The synopsis leaves something out that, in my opinion, is pretty important.

Things started off promising! Kestrel arrives at Pembrook Park on Christmas Eve night, before all of the other guests arrive, and before the 12 Days of Christmas event is to begin. The employees think she’s the newly hired maid, and she doesn’t realize she’s not meant to be the maid (because she thinks this is her character’s part in the event) so she agrees that she is. They have fun getting to know each other and being silly all night and it’s all very festive and cute. On Christmas morning they find out she’s actually a guest, not the maid, and the mood changes. All of a sudden, they’re supposed to be putting on a show for her and they need to get her set up to play her role as a regency lady. Then the other guests arrive and the clunky playacting begins. The men are excessively drippy with their flirtations and I think my eyes might have rolled out of my head and onto the floor. Kestrel is starved for any and all attention, and the only other guest I met before quitting is a smug little brat.

Pembrook Park has changed for the worse. It’s lost all the charm it had before, and the magic of putting a solid divider between modern-day reality and regency England isn’t there anymore. That divider has turned transparent, and I did not feel like I’d been transported back in time. The characters talk about modern things and they talk like it’s modern day. Pembrook Park is co-run by two women. One is a rude stick in the mud, and the other one is an over-the-top, flamboyant ball of quirky nonsense who calls herself Charming and has the most obnoxious on again off again partner. Even though she’s in supposed to be charge, she lets him make all the decisions and since he pretty much hates Pembrook Park his decisions are not good ones. The dialogue between all the characters is weird and overly cheesy. Everyone is trying to act, but coming off as very bad at it. But what I hated the most were Kestrel’s “Before” segments. This girl grew up in a cult and has clearly been traumatized. She was separated from her mom, who was fine with it, and these sections made me incredibly sad. She’s also been hurt by people and struggles with feelings of inadequacy and abandonment. I cannot go back and forth between zany fake regency shenanigans and Kestrel’s trauma dumping. There is nothing in the book’s synopsis that prepared me for this, and it gave me emotional whiplash.

I was so excited for Christmas to explode on Pembrook Park. I wanted an old fashioned Christmas: traditional Christmas carols, wassail, roasting chestnuts, and snowball fights on the front lawn. I wanted swoony male characters, wooing the ladies in a way I couldn’t tell if they were pretending or not. Kisses under the mistletoe, fake feelings becoming real ones, and to be enveloped with feelings of comfort and warmth. I wanted a festive vacation to yesteryear that I could cozy up with and read every December by the light of my Christmas tree. I didn’t get any of this. Does it get better? Maybe. Maybe all of this comes later, but I can’t continue slogging through this in the hopes that it does. So I’m done. And if there’s another Austenland installment in another 10 years, I probably won’t be reading that one either. I’m so disappointed!