Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Jillian Dare: A Modern Retelling of Jane Eyre by Melanie M. Jeschke

 

DNF @ 51%

This was actually quite well written, it was the story itself that beggars belief. The author made the odd choice of setting this in 2008, and yet writing it as if it were still historical. The end result is stilted and painfully anachronistic, and underscores something I had never really noticed in christian romance before, or at least never been quite able to put my finger on: so many of them portray close-mindedness as a virtue. The heroine in this book, Jillian, grew up without a TV. She doesn't know who Colin Firth is, can barely recognize a British accent, and refuses to drink in countries where she is the legal drinking age because she's not the American legal drinking age. She thinks "Marta" is hard to remember and hard to pronounce, and sits quietly with her little salad while the men around her talk over their steaks.

I honestly feel like this would have been better if it had been set in the 1950s or earlier. Part of the problem with modernizing classic works of literature is keeping the spirit of the characters while making them believable in the modern times. Jeschke made her hero a billionaire telecom/movie producer guy, but she gave him the lifestyle of an uptight christian man. She made her heroine a fresh-out-of-college twenty-year-old but she feels like she escaped from a doomsday bunker.

It's not bad, it's just boring. I'd recommend this to people who like Pure Flix movies.

2 to 2.5 out of 5 stars

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.