Screaming, crying, throwing up. WINTERSCAPE is a gothic romance written by one of my favorite authors, Natasha Peters (although Anastasia Cleaver is her gothic-specific pseudonym). I don't think I've given a single one of her books less than five stars. Whether she's writing first person or third person, she is a TALENT. Her literary references and attention to detail are just fantastic, and nobody does cruel, flawed, and seductive heroes the way she does. Like, no one.
Helena is the daughter of a piano musician who has spent most of her life poor, traveling from gig to gig with her father. Her father was two steps removed from Chopin, but the two of them are the literal definition of starving artists. When she sees an ad for a piano teacher after her father's untimely death, she answers it. But the family she's working for is strange. They are the Vallelongas family, and the patriarch, Andreas Vallelonga is a manic trickster cast in the mold of Edward Rochester whose once-beautiful wife is now haggard and dying, and he himself was once a piano master who destroyed his hands while drunk by cutting them on broken glass.
Her job is to tutor Andreas's son, Michele, who has a hump and a limp, and has been treated like shit by both his parents. She was actually hired by his uncle Daniele, and has quite the nasty surprise when Andreas intrudes on one of their lessons and says, "If I can't play piano, NO ONE CAN!" But Helena is unfazed and dresses him down, which he finds intriguing and amusing enough to let her stay. What results is a family drama of the finest order, with drunken aunts, crazy religious aunts, player uncles, scheming uncles, and an evil patriarch and matriarch who are used to having everyone dance to their own tune. Everyone is playing along because the family inheritance is on the line, but when someone dies unexpectedly and poison is suspected, suddenly, Helena finds herself in the line of fire...
The writing in this book was amazing. There's a great line where Andreas is described as a Lucifer encased in his own frozen tears. And Helena does feel very Jane Eyre-sque, especially with her no-nonsense demeanor and the fact that she feels a little too good for the manbaby love interest who throws tantrums when he doesn't get his way and parades one of his old flames in front of her to make her jealous. Interestingly, there's a bit of a taboo element as well because
***SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER***
Andreas's wife was Helena's mother, so when they get together at the end, she's kind of getting together with her stepfather. Very demure, very mindful, very cutesy. I just read another gothic romance recently where the girl ended up with her stepbrother, so who knew that the 70s gothics lines liked to get so down and dirty? Dark romance is quaking in its boots.
I call books like these FULTs, or fucked up lady thrillers, and the requirement is basically that the female narrator hasn't got her shit together and there's a Suspicious Hot Guy (SHG) who might or might not be the villain. FULTs are the best kinds of thrillers and you absolutely cannot change my mind.
I found THE SILENT WOMAN in a Little Free Library and loved the cover and thought the summary sounded amazing. It actually sounded a lot like Freida McFadden's THE WIFE UPSTAIRS, and there are a ton of similarities, but I think this is because they're both clearly inspired by Jane Eyre. The twists and some of the core elements are different enough that they don't feel exactly the same.
If you're familiar with stories like Jane Eyre and Rebecca, you know the score. A woman marries a charming and rich man only to find out that he has baggage in the form of an ex-wife who's still kind of in the picture. I liked that Jade was a biographer and met her husband through her work. She felt fleshed out and competent and nice. Don't get me wrong, I love messy ladies, but I like nice ladies, too.
I don't want to say too much more because I don't want to spoil any of the twists, but if you enjoy books written by authors like May Cobb, Lindsay Marcott, or Emily Carpenter, you're probably going to enjoy this.
I'm surprised this was published in 2012, it feels like it was published ten years earlier. There's an emo vibe to this book that is such a perfect fit with the alt-girl aesthetics of the early 2000s. I wish I'd liked it more but the characterization of Jane was so odd. I love the idea of an underprivileged girl getting a scholarship to a weird and creepy school where people have gone missing or dead. But this book was all vibes and no explanation. Like, there's a portion where Jane is translating Latin she sees to herself... where did she learn Latin if she grew up in the "ghetto" surrounded by pimps and drug-dealers? So many things like this, that just were glossed over.
This showed up on a list of Jane Eyre retellings. I've said in other reviews that the original Jane Eyre was kind of half-romance, half-thriller, so retellings tend to go either way since most authors can't capture the gothic ambiance of the original... and that's fine. I'm not a purist and I'll happily read either iteration of one of my classic faves.
THE WIFE UPSTAIRS is about Sylvia. The book opens with her saving a woman from choking in a restaurant... but the woman is a scammer who then threatens to sue her for saving her life. A man witnesses the whole thing, stands up for Sylvia, and then they get to talking. He finds out she's looking for a job and guess what? He's hiring. He's a famous novelist looking for a companion for his wife, who was in a terrible accident. She spends all day in the attic room, alone, receiving drugs and food through a tube. Isolated, except for her nurse and the housekeeper.
Sylvia agrees and receives free room and board in the couple's remote estate in Montauk. And right away, things seem fishy. Sylvia finds a notebook in the wife, Victoria's room, which turns out to be Victoria's journal. And what she finds in the journal doesn't quite add up with the account that she's received from the husband, Adam. Worse, it paints a rather dark picture.
Because Victoria might be lying too.
This book was pretty hard to read for a lot of reasons. I just read DRAGONWYCK by Anya Seton and talked about how it had a lot of fat-shaming. This book, THE WIFE UPSTAIRS, has a similar problem, in that it has a lot of ableism. The way that Sylvia talks about Victoria, and the language she uses, is pretty dehumanizing and awful. There's a lot of talk about how pathetic she is, and how she's a shadow of her former self, and how "lucky" she is that Adam didn't "stuff" her in a home. None of these characters are supposed to be particularly likable, so I'm sure that was a deliberate choice to show what assholes the characters are, but it's still jarring to read, and I thought I'd mention it here just in case someone doesn't want to read that, coming from the protagonist.
As for the story itself... it was fine. Other people have said this was a lot like VERITY and I agree that they had a lot of the same tropes. The core stories are different, though, and so are the endings. I personally thought VERITY was a little better and did the whole suspense thing a little better. I found myself skipping THE WIFE UPSTAIRS a lot. Some of the twists are the same, too, so I think if you read VERITY, you probably won't be as impressed with THE WIFE UPSTAIRS. I found myself guessing what was going to happen pretty early in the book. It wasn't exact but it was close enough.
It's a cozy christian mystery which is not usually my thing but it's jane eyre so i have toIt's a cozy christian mystery which is not usually my thing but it's jane eyre so i have to...more
MAGIC UNDER GLASS was on a list of Jane Eyre retellings, which I was a little skeptical about at first because when I read the summary, it didn't sound very Jane Eyre-y.
This is the story of a girl named Nimira, who comes from a Pan Asian-inspired country that mostly seems to be Indian-inspired but has flavors from some other countries, too. She is a dancer, and even though dancing is well respected where she comes from, it's considered pretty base and deplorable in the England-inspired asshole country where she resides now.
One day, a man steals her away from her low-paying job with the offer of a more private performance. He has an automaton that his previous dancing girls thought was haunted and wants a living human girl to perform alongside it at parties. In exchange, she also gets room and board. It seems like a pretty sweet deal and obviously she takes it, because the boss that she has now is a total creep.
But as soon as she gets to the house, she starts noticing weird stuff. The servant girls are oddly frightened, and there's strange rumors about her new employer, Hollin's, dead wife. And the automaton that she's supposed to dance with seems like it might be alive after all... and in desperate need of help.
Reviews for this book are mixed, which both surprises me and not. The original cover for this book made it seem like this was going to be a very light romantasy for girls, when actually, this book has a lot of really dark themes like colonialism, orientalism, racism, political corruption, and capitalist greed. Most of these themes are actually handled pretty well, including the orientalism + racism, although I am guessing that maybe some readers looking for lighter fare got pissed that the subjects got so heavy.
This also really isn't a romance in the usual sense. Nimira is very strong but all the men around her are very weak: morally, in their convictions, or physically. She is the savior, and even the nicest love interest (who is very cinnamon roll-like) isn't able to protect her or court her in the usual way. Nimira plays the active role that is normally reserved for the hero, and people looking for traditional fantasy gender roles in their romances with "strong, swoonworthy heroes" probably wouldn't like this.
As for me, I like it when a story takes risks. This is more Jane Eyre-inspired than it is a direct retelling, but the gothic adjacent vibes are definitely there, and I liked that, too. I'd recommend this to readers of Gail Carson Levine and Diana Wynne Jones (the book comped itself to Libba Bray and Charlotte Bronte, but I think that was another mistake-- it's not really like either).
I was browsing rom-coms randomly when I happened upon this book and saw the words "Rochester Farms." That, paired with the historical-looking cover, made me gasp out loud: "IS THIS A JANE EYRE RETELLING?" In case you didn't know, I'm currently in the middle of a project where I have made it my business to read every Jane Eyre retelling or Jane Eyre-inspired work I can easily get my hands on. Most of them have been recommended to me, or pulled from list, but I keep coming across others that I'd never even heard of before!
THE PLANT NANNY is set in Seattle. The heroine, Lena, was studying to be a botanist when she realized that her Master's wouldn't actually get her a career, so now she's a drop-out working at a plant shop that's about to go out of business. One of her acquaintances tells her about a spiffy job at a place called Rochester Farms, where the billionaire, Andrew Keene, is looking for someone to watch his rare collection of orchids full time and is willing to pay in both room and board.
It seems too good to be true. And it is.
Because not only is Andrew Keene rich enough to hire full-time plant nannies, he's also hot AF.
So this was originally going to be a four or five star read because the beginning was SO good. It made me laugh out loud several times. And even though the heroine is kind of a compulsive liar, and that's always kind of put me off because sociopathic lying-as-adorkable-awkwardness has ground my gears since my Sophie Kinsella Shopaholic days, I could sort of buy it for this character because she was portrayed as being so panicked and awkward. I also loved that she wore really thick prescription glasses, and how the author made a point of talking about how annoying it is to wear glasses when it's foggy or raining.
The problems started coming in towards the second half of the book. There's a scene where Lena kicks Andrew in the balls and then hits him in the face, and it totally came out of left field because Andrew hadn't really done anything to warrant that. And then she tries to attack him again later in the book! I always hate when women-on-men violence is played off as cute because it comes across as saying that women can't actually hurt men because they're so weak and cute. There's another scene which also put me off where Andrew lies about being a veteran and gets a military discount. I think that scene is actually going to offend a lot of readers, and here, it's just played for laughs.
There were still things I did love about this book, which is why it's still getting a three. It feels like a love ode to the PNW, and especially Seattle. The food descriptions were amazing and it's clear that the author really loves Jane Eyre. I'm kind of getting the impression that every book in this series of hers is loosely inspired by one of her favorite novels and I think that's a really cute idea. I also loved how on one of their dates-that-isn't-a-date, Andrew buys the heroine a nice pair of prescription glasses.
I'm not sure how I felt about the ending. It really felt like it jumped the shark to me and the ending felt a little too hasty and neat considering some of the ups and downs of these characters. Overall, I think I'd give the first 50% 4 stars and the second 50% 2 stars, which rounds out to about a three. I'll definitely be reading more from this author, though. I do like her writing style and she has a good sense for comedic timing, even if her characters sometimes go a little too chaotic OTT.
I adored the first two books in this series. JANE EYRE is one of my favorite books and I've currently been snapping up as many of the retellings that I could find so I can read them and compare them... not so much in terms of how they compare to the original, but more as how they stand as individual artistic creations. In my not-so-humble opinion, the best retellings aren't carbon copies of their original source material, but instead place their own unique spin on a story to truly make it their own.
DEATH OF A SCHOOLGIRL and DEATH OF A DOWAGER were both so fun. One had a grim dark academia vibe that I absolutely loved, and the other was like a dark spin on comedy of manners, with everything from the cut sublime(!) to royal intrigue.
CHRISTMAS AT FERNDEAN MANOR was less entertaining. It literally starts out with Jane scurrying around in the woods, gathering nuts and berries like a squirrel. From there, it takes multiple detours, like conkers and the history of using them in games, Rochester being sad about having to sell his horse, and angst about Christmas because when Jane was a young orphan, she didn't really have one.
There's a Christmas special feel to this book, which I personally am not usually a fan of, since I don't like Christmas (bah, humbug). I kept thinking about that one Beauty and the Beast movie, Beauty and the Beast and the Enchanted Christmas. You know the one that kind of disrupted canon and made everything weird in its quest to show why Christmas is the Most Important Holiday to Ever Important?
I do think this author has a lot of talent and, like I said, I LOVED books one and two. I'm not sure if I'll check out the fourth one now. At least it has "death" in the title, unlike this one.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
>
Books:
jane-eyre
(62)
Loading...
