Jane (book 3/26)

If you stick around for any amount of time, you'll see that one of my big loves in both books & films is adaptations of classic novels. As much as I enjoy faithful adapations and retellings, I also have a huge weak spot for modernized retellings (hence the debacle that was From Prada to Nada).

Jane by April Lindner is a modernized retelling of Jane Eyre. I do recommend it; I finished it in one day (I stayed up until after midnight on Christmas eve just so I could get to the end). Now, I have only read Jane Eyre once, during the summer between fourth & fifth grade after I became obsessed with the story following a viewing of the Orson Welles adaptation (What can I say? I was a weird kid.), but from what I recall from the book & numerous BBC adaptations, this retelling is very faithful to the source material.

Mr. Rochester is now Nico Rathburn, a has-been rocker who's about to stage a comeback. Jane Moore is hired to be nanny to his illegitimate daughter from a slutty model, and the typical "fall in love, find out your fiance has a crazy wife in the attic, run from your problems, return after a catastrophe" plot follows. And that's kind of the weakness of the story: there are some things in the Jane Eyre original story that just wouldn't fly today, and that hurts this faithful reboot.

While Ms. Lindner usually does a great job with updating the story, I took issue with a couple of parts of the plot:

First, I didn't like that Nico would go ahead and try to marry Jane even though he has never divorced his first wife. That made me lose respect for the character because while the original Mr. Rochester didn't have the option of divorce, Nico undoubtedly knows all about divorce and bigamy.

Second, I didn't like that after Jane left she never tried to find out about Nico's daughter. She supposedly had a strong bond with the girl, but we didn't see her worrying about the poor kid after Jane fled (People magazine has a whole creepy sub-site dedicated to the children of celebs; it's not like she wouldn't be able to get some sort of update). By the end of the novel, the child's been shipped back to her Paris Hilton of a mother who was painted as a horrible guardian all along, which also makes you lose some more sympathy for Nico.

And finally, there wasn't really a good build of affection between Nico and Jane. In the original Jane Eyre, it wasn't such an issue because you weren't expected to date and form a strong passionate relationship before you married. However, today, that's how we operate. There were precious few scenes that convinced me Nico really loved Jane; instead, at times it seemed more like he was in love with the fact that a young girl was still attracted to him.

Despite my issues with the story, I did still enjoy it immensely. When I finished I had a big smile on my face, and I put it back on my bookshelf instead of adding it to the stack to put in my classroom, so I obviously have a desire to read it again...