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A review by margaret
Brightly Burning by Alexa Donne
3.0
Rating: 2.5 stars
“Everyone on board this ship is a bit like a solitary planet. We orbit the same sun, but on lonely tracks.”
This retelling of Jane Eyre is set somewhere in a future in which the Earth has become uninhabitable and humanity orbits around it on space stations waiting until they can return to the planet. Stella Ainsley is our “Jane” character, a young woman hired as a governess aboard a ship called the Rochester, which contains its fair share of secrets.
Starting out, I found myself having fun with this. Yes, the writing wasn’t spectacular, the worldbuilding didn’t totally make sense, and the beginning dragged, but it was entertaining and I was curious to see how things played out. Unfortunately, the further I went, the more I realized that this retelling…doesn’t really work.
I’ll admit that I was kept engaged throughout the entire book and was never truly bored, but ultimately, this felt in many ways more like a draft than a completed novel. Parts of it simply felt sloppily done. Plus, there were changes made from the original story that didn’t make sense to me. I never know whether my hesitance to changes comes simply from attachment to the original story – however, in this case, I think it’s plain that those changes weren’t right. Major issues felt skated over and plot points that didn’t make sense were added in an attempt to transfer an old story into a futuristic setting. I don’t want to spoil anything, but that ending was…A Mess.
This is probably all coming off as very negative, even though I did actually have fun reading this, in a weird way. There was a lot of potential with this idea, and done right it could have been great. Unfortunately, done right is not how I would describe this book.
Content warnings: alcohol abuse, plague
“Everyone on board this ship is a bit like a solitary planet. We orbit the same sun, but on lonely tracks.”
This retelling of Jane Eyre is set somewhere in a future in which the Earth has become uninhabitable and humanity orbits around it on space stations waiting until they can return to the planet. Stella Ainsley is our “Jane” character, a young woman hired as a governess aboard a ship called the Rochester, which contains its fair share of secrets.
Starting out, I found myself having fun with this. Yes, the writing wasn’t spectacular, the worldbuilding didn’t totally make sense, and the beginning dragged, but it was entertaining and I was curious to see how things played out. Unfortunately, the further I went, the more I realized that this retelling…doesn’t really work.
I’ll admit that I was kept engaged throughout the entire book and was never truly bored, but ultimately, this felt in many ways more like a draft than a completed novel. Parts of it simply felt sloppily done. Plus, there were changes made from the original story that didn’t make sense to me. I never know whether my hesitance to changes comes simply from attachment to the original story – however, in this case, I think it’s plain that those changes weren’t right. Major issues felt skated over and plot points that didn’t make sense were added in an attempt to transfer an old story into a futuristic setting. I don’t want to spoil anything, but that ending was…A Mess.
This is probably all coming off as very negative, even though I did actually have fun reading this, in a weird way. There was a lot of potential with this idea, and done right it could have been great. Unfortunately, done right is not how I would describe this book.
Content warnings: alcohol abuse, plague