Reviews with content warning for Gun violence - The Eyre Affair

Honestly, this was a wild and wack ride but I really enjoyed it. I liked the literary elements alongside the funky time/history parts. Keen to see what happens in the next book.

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piperclover's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.25

This is a really really difficult book for me to rate. I'm not even entirely sure how I feel about it. There's so many moving parts and names and places and things to remember that I'm honestly not sure I even I understand the story and anything but decently vague terms.

There's definitely a lot of things I did not like. Because it was written in 2009 it has many instances of casual fat jokes and sexism. Those were obnoxious. While this is a mystery it is very much a literary mystery so it's very slow and dense. Theres a ton of on page discussion of political uprisings, war, and machinations. In fact the entire first chapter pretty much is all discussing and info dumping about the fictional war between Russia and England on the Crimean peninsula.

The summary and title are incredibly misleading. I went into this thinking it was going to be a largely a story about how Jane Eyre comes to life from her book and how she gets put back inside of it but Jane Eyre doesn't make it on page until 78% of the way through this book. I enjoy the overarching plot a lot and there are a lot of really cool features about who can travel into the books and who can travel out of the books and how in books impacts the story, etc and I even really enjoy the main villain but I just wish that the summary and title were different so that it was more honest about what the book is actually about.

I don't usually enjoy historical fiction but here it's not bad. I also usually don't enjoy any sort of alternate timeline/flashbacks/ inserts that aren't contemporaneous to the plot but here the entries in the beginning of the chapter are quite neat. They add context and thoughts from various perspectives within the world of the story but after the plot ends so it becomes something of an annotated novel of a story being told.

The narrator is really great. If you like the Loki TV show on Disney plus I think you will enjoy this because it deals very heavily with the actual abilities of time travel as in it discusses it in detail in many scenes. Its also incredibly detailed about various literary theories such as if William Shakespeare actually wrote all the works attributed to him. I haven't read any of the big classics so this was definitely too detailed and niche for me.

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julesadventurezone's review against another edition

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funny lighthearted mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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skudiklier's review against another edition

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adventurous funny lighthearted mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

I'm not sure how I felt about this book! It took me a while to get into it and it definitely wasn't my favorite, but it's also a type of book I don't read very often. I thought it was funny and entertaining and I liked a lot of the characters. It really picked up in the second half for me and I read nearly all of that in one day. (A day I was on a plane and too tired to do anything but read, but still.)

The absurdity/satire was done well I think. One thing that felt a little off to me is that it just felt *so* written by a man, if that makes sense? Not in a bad way necessarily--it's not like it was sexist or anything. But the first-person narrator is a woman and I just...couldn't buy it. I'm not one for gender essentialism (I'm literally trans and genderfluid lmao) but I just kept feeling like the voice of the book was a straight man. But it wasn't a big deal or enough to take me out of the book too often.

Anyway! Overall I liked it, if not enthusiastically. If this is the kind of book you're into I'd recommend it, but for anyone like me who isn't sure if they're really interested, I'd say you don't need to try.

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