mattnixon 's review for:

Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye

5.0

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A loving and wholly original tribute/meta-fictive re-imagining of Jane Eyre, Jane Steele is a page-turning, ever-so-slightly larger-than-life, ridiculously fun and charming post-feminist hero story. Faye takes on Jane Eyre's basic structure and themes of identity, class, patriarchy and reconciling personal happiness with virtue and gives us a heroine who, while trying to channel Jane Eyre as her spirit animal, finds she's capable of and compelled to deal with her oppressors in more decisive and final (and murderous) ways. Jane Steele cleverly places the 21st century reader into Steele's 19th century mindset, rationalizing and self-recriminating for her acts of resistance to the institutions of female oppression: the family (and family name), schools, sex and commerce (and the commerce of sex), marriage, the law and the Crown. As always, Faye bring her unparalleled ability to give her heroes a unique, pitch-perfect voice: three-dimensional, human, specific, and with a trenchant wit that makes you laugh out loud and fall in love. In Jane Steele, Lyndsay Faye's writing is manifested and personified in Jane: irresistibly charming, reliably surprising, and equally prone to steal or break your heart (or stab you in it).