Searching for Captain Wentworth

Jane Austen-inspired fiction is everywhere. She has a mystery-solving series and has even entered the world of vampires! What would she say if she knew this, I wonder? An author who has written many JA-inspired books is Jane Odiwe. I recently purchased Searching for Captain Wentworth from B & N for my NOOK app.
Summary: When aspiring writer, Sophie Elliot, receives the keys to the family townhouse in Bath, it's an invitation she can't turn down, especially when she learns that she will be living next door to the house Jane Austen lived in. Sophie's neglected house is harboring more than the antiquated furniture and nesting mice, though initially she tries to dismiss the haunting visions of a young girl from her thoughts.

People would visit bath to drink the "healing" water.

On accidentally discovering that an ancient glove belonging to her mysterious neighbor, Josh Strafford, will transport her back in time to Regency Bath, she questions her sanity. Sophie is soon caught up in two dimensions, each reality as certain as the other and each giving her more questions than answers about her own family history and the power of love.

Torn between her life in the modern world, and that of her ancestor who befriends Jane Austen and her fascinating brother Charles, Sophie's story travels two hundred years across time, and back again, to unite this modern heroine with her own version of Captain Wentworth.

The famous hot water spring baths.

My Thoughts: This is a fun romance with a time-travel twist. It is very highly liked on all websites. I liked it more at the beginning than the end, which was rushed and made everything seem unbelievable with too many coincidences that I won't mention because of spoilers. That's funny to say about a book with time travel, but I can suspend disbelief for a major element of the story but not when it's over used. I enjoyed the 1802 setting when Sophie became Sophia, an actual girl from that time, and a long-distant relation to Sophie. She would exhibit some of Sophie's mannerisms that just grew stronger the longer she spent in the past.
I didn't really like or relate to Sophie, the main character. She was supposedly devastated after catching her boyfriend with her best friend at the beginning of the book, but she didn't seem to think about it too often. She was often passive and just allowed things to happen, the way a young lady of 1802 might do, but in her head she was always thinking about what a restricted life they lived. She also mentions at the beginning of the book that it will be exciting to live next to Jane Austen's house and perhaps be inspired to read and re-read Jane's books because she wasn't an Austen obsessed fan and knew nothing about Jane's life other than the books. However, in the modern time period she is constantly able to determine when someone is quoting an Austen book, and which one it is. Inconsistencies like that and the time breaks when she traveled really get to me no matter what book I am reading.

I thought there was more that needed to be said about the time travel and various artifacts like the paintings and locket that were discovered, but the book was already 300 pages. If I was editing I might have suggested shortening some of Sophie's internal musings or the elaborate descriptions to have Sophie do a little time travel research. Overall, it's a nice story, which I would recommend if the reader doesn't stop to over-analyze as I did. I will definitely give another of Ms. Odiwe's books a try.