I guess one other thing is that I came into the book with low expectations.

I bought it second-hand for a couple of bucks, because I was bored and I had heard some bad things about it already… for this reason I guess I was kinda surprised at what things in the book did work.

But this book is most definitely not meant to be taken seriously. It was written as a bit of a lark, and that is the spirit it should be read in (and the spirit it should’ve been marketed as, I agree with you that the cover and blurb are VERY misleading as to the actual content of the book).

I pity you, having to write an essay on it, as much as I find “Jenna Starborn” amusing in it’s jocular and fannish way, the book simply isn’t worth it. It’s too much a piece of lightweight frothy escapism to be worth that much analysis.
(unless perhaps you were writing an essay on different types of fan fiction, I dunno)

It’s funny….

….one of the things that made me give some of Shinn’s other stuff a try was that I sent a letter to her through her website saying BOTH positive and negative things about this book.

She wrote back, agreeing with much of my criticism, as well as saying how she would’ve done it differently in retrospect.

She also noted that it’s the most polarising “love it or hate it” piece she’s ever done and that every year she gets one gushing piece of mail about it and one really venomous hate mail.

My gripe with the tense isn’t that it’s inconsistent – it’s that it’s inconsistent with the conceit of her talking into a recorder. Jane Eyre is telling a story from the past, and she slips into present tense mainly in times of high emotion, and that’s fine. But Sharon Shinn uses this recorder idea, and then she doesn’t stick with it. So that’s what bugged me.

Have you read anything else by Sharon Shinn?

“Jenna Starborn” is quite atypical of her work…

You’d be well advised to try her Crawford award winning fantasy novel “The Shape Changer’s Wife” (if you want a well written gothic romance, with a bit of fantasy, that shows a Bronte influence).

Her whimsical children’s fairytale “The Safe Keeper’s Secret”, the traditional swords n’ sorcery saga “Mystic & Rider” and the cult sci fi book “Archangel” also show her at her best… as a groundbreaking and inventive sci-fi/fantasy writer.

“Jenna Starborn” is a blip on her record, and Shinn herself has said she would’ve done it differently had she had the chance to do it all over again… basically she considers it a kind of fan fiction….. which is also how I look at it….

I think that “Jenna Starborn” is goofy, but I kinda liked it despite myself…. because I’m a “Jane Eyre” fan, a Shinn fan and a sci fi geek as well… I guess I could relate to the emotions that must’ve motivated Shinn to do this.

Also, I don’t think the book was designed to be taken as seriously as you think. A lot of the bits that you said come across as parodic, I think they are designed that way…

…for instance, Bronte’s novel is quite inconsistent when it comes to the tense of the narrative voice as well…

I don’t think she’s done any other sci-fi adaptations of great novels, but I haven’t looked into it extensively. I’ve seen some good reviews of her other books on book blogs, so I might try another one sometime. When I’ve recovered. Maybe.

Or want to and then I’d see “Reeder” and collapse into giggles . Is Jane Eyre the only classic she tried to destroy? I’d love for someone else to read and then tell me what she did with, say, Little Women.