BOOK REVIEW: Jane Steele, by Lyndsay Faye

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BOOK REVIEW: Jane Steele, by Lyndsay FayeTitle: Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye
Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons
Published: March 22nd 2016
Genres: Fiction
Pages: 416
Format: Hardcover
Source: Library
Goodreads

A reimagining of Jane Eyre as a gutsy, heroic serial killer, from the author whose work The New York Times described as “riveting” and The Wall Street Journal called “thrilling.”   “Young Jane Steele’s favorite book, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, mirrors her life both too little and too much…In an arresting tale of dark humor and sometimes gory imagination, Faye has produced a heroine worthy of the gothic literature canon but reminiscent of detective fiction.”Library Journal, Starred Review
“Reader, I murdered him.”   A sensitive orphan, Jane Steele suffers first at the hands of her spiteful aunt and predatory cousin, then at a grim school where she fights for her very life until escaping to London, leaving the corpses of her tormentors behind her. After years of hiding from the law while penning macabre “last confessions” of the recently hanged, Jane thrills at discovering an advertisement.  Her aunt has died and her childhood home has a new master: Mr. Charles Thornfield, who seeks a governess.   Burning to know whether she is in fact the rightful heir, Jane takes the position incognito, and learns that Highgate House is full of marvelously strange new residents—the fascinating but caustic Mr. Thornfield, an army doctor returned from the Sikh Wars, and the gracious Sikh butler Mr. Sardar Singh, whose history with Mr. Thornfield appears far deeper and darker than they pretend. As Jane catches ominous glimpses of the pair’s violent history and falls in love with the gruffly tragic Mr. Thornfield, she faces a terrible dilemma: can she possess him—body, soul, and secrets—without revealing her own murderous past?   A satirical romance about identity, guilt, goodness, and the nature of lies, by a writer who Matthew Pearl calls “superstar-caliber” and whose previous works Gillian Flynn declared “spectacular,” Jane Steele is a brilliant and deeply absorbing book inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s classic Jane Eyre.

 Reader, I murdered him.

I’ve never read Faye’s work before, and I was going to put off reading Jane Steele until I’d read a few of her others, but when I saw the book on the library shelves, I grabbed it, sat down, and read it in a day. I wouldn’t necessarily call this a Jane Eyre retelling, but it’s certainly Jane Eyre-inspired, as evidenced from Jane Steele’s fondness for the Charlotte Brontë novel.

Jane Steele’s life follows a similar trajectory as the character Jane Eyre, and she finds comfort in her fictional counterpart. The major difference between Steele and Eyre is that while Eyre merely struggles and sometimes voices her discontent against the female imprisonment and injustice in society by men, Steele actually does something about it. And by doing something about it, she murders the offending men. She isn’t a serial killer. She murders in self-defense, as a way to protect her life and the lives of others.

It’s well-paced, vicious, atmospheric, and a little predictable if you’re familiar with Jane Eyre’s story. The way in which Faye writes makes you feel as if you’re in the dirty heart of Victorian London. The biggest, most frustrating aspect of the entire thing was how forced Steele’s relationship felt with Thornfield most of the time, almost as if Steele expected and forced her life to follow in Eyre’s footsteps because that’s what she was familiar with and that’s where she found comfort. But there’s a scene with Clarke that made me gasp and sigh and long for so much more development in that direction. That would have been the twist that earned that fifth star.

If you enjoy Jane Eyre and its many incarnations; Victoriana; and historical fiction with strong, deviant women, you’ll surely find something to enjoy in Jane Steele.

BOOK REVIEW: Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch

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BOOK REVIEW: Dark Matter, by Blake CrouchTitle: Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
Published by Crown Publishing
Published: July 26th 2016
Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 342
Format: Hardcover
Source: Blogging for Books
Goodreads

“Are you happy with your life?” Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious. Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits. Before a man Jason’s never met smiles down at him and says, “Welcome back, my friend.”
In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable--something impossible.
Is it this world or the other that’s the dream? And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could’ve imagined—one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe.

 I suppose we’re both just trying to come to terms with how horrifying infinity really is.

Dark Matter is a wild ride through alternate realities and the realities we create for ourselves. It’s a fast-paced thriller that will keep you guessing about the twists and turns until the very end.

Jason lives a comfortable, happy life, but from the beginning we see that he’s consistently plagued with the question what if. What if he didn’t marry his wife and settle down with a kid? What if he won a prestigious prize instead of his friend? What if he continued on his research instead of losing funding because he decided to focus on his family? Jason confronts those what-ifs when he’s abducted and pushed into a different reality. In the first reality that is different from his own, he sees what his world could have been if he decided to focus on his work rather than focus on his family, and in the midst of trying to get back to his “home” reality, Jason realizes that his other self has stepped into his role and taken over his alternate self’s what-ifs.

It’s bendy, it will probably make you think what just happened many times until everything comes to a head and you have to read to the very end. It raises the questions of reality, that realities can be created together and shared together, and that our futures are created every nanosecond along the way. If you aren’t careful, your split selves may come back for you. And ultimately it’s a romance in the sense that Jason realizes that life isn’t worth truly living unless he’s with his Daniela, no matter how many versions of her he meets along the way back home.

I really enjoyed this. It’s an exciting, breezy read that makes me hope that there will be a mini-series or a movie of this, because it would be so cool to see some of the scenes played out on screen.

Thank you to Crown Publishing and Blogging for Books for a review copy!

BOOK REVIEW: A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara

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BOOK REVIEW: A Little Life, by Hanya YanagiharaTitle: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Published by Doubleday
Published: March 10th 2015
Genres: Fiction
Pages: 720
Format: Trade Paper
Source: Purchased
Goodreads

When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.

 Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It’s so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace.

This is one of those books that everyone’s been talking about forever, and I finally decided to get it and read it, and oh my god, I cried a lot. It’s a difficult, graphic, and upsetting novel, and it’s one that requires a dedication to read it, because once I reached the halfway point, I made the decision to finish it that night.

This novel follows the lives of four friends who graduate from college and live in New York City. Most of the novel revolves around one character, Jude St. Francis, and the narration switches between past and present, first and third person. It is very much a character novel, and it explores the relationships of these four friends with each other and others throughout Jude’s life.

I initially had a few issues with it. This novel is timeless. The events in the novel take place in a New York that is not cemented in any specific time. There are no references to 9/11, no references to election years, no reference to politics or major news. I also felt that this was a little too long. Don’t get me wrong, I could read endlessly about any and all of these characters and would love to, and I got the impression that we as readers want to feel as if these four specific friends are our four specific friends. But. I felt that with some removal of some scenes, the novel could have been more solidly focused around Jude because, in essence, this is a novel about Jude. And finally, sometimes I couldn’t tell whether or not I was reading about a Jude (or a Willem, or a JB, or a Malcolm) who was twenty-five or a Jude (or a Willem, or a JB, or a Malcolm) who was forty-five. Some people don’t change, sometimes our inner voice stays and sounds the same throughout our entire lives, but I really wanted to hear that growth sometimes. Again, it adds to the timelessness of the novel, that we’re who we are no matter who or what anyone else says or does, so I understand.

Finally, is anyone’s life that consistently miserable? I read a handful of reviews after finishing it that called it “grief porn” or something to that effect, and in some ways I agree, because I can’t see how anyone who considers Jude that much of a friend would let so much of his later-life violence happen to him. All of Jude’s close friends at some point or another seemed to enable Jude’s behavior. How, after such atrocities have been committed against a person, does anyone, including the victim, allow it to continue happening to such a violent degree? Yes, I know, at some point we’ve got to let the person live his life, that he’s allowed to have his own say in what happens. I know there are legalities regarding committing people, to help them. It just seemed so implausible that there was no hope for Jude.  Half the novel was implausible, but the fact that there’s a prevalent trope of gay men always having unhappy endings is disheartening?? There’s a sense of dread surrounding Jude, a sense of wondering when that suffering is going to end and who’s going to end it and when, because there’s no hope for happiness for him and that’s probably the most upsetting part about the entire thing.

The more I thought about the problems I had with the novel, the more I thought about the history and construction of various genres of the novel. And it hit me. There’s a reason for all of this.

It’s so Gothic it hurts.

A Little Life is a modern Gothic novel, with its secrets,  its big empty living spaces, and its explorations of love and death. Jude is our virginal maiden, Brother Luke and Caleb are our villainous tyrants (members the clergy in Gothic literature are often evil, and god is Brother Luke and everyone in that monastery evil), Willem and Andy are our heroes, the spaces in which Jude lives are often characters in themselves, and so much of the violence occurs at night, that psychological overlay of darkness. The Gothic novel is wildly implausible, preys on our emotions, is utterly sensational, and pleases us with its terror.

This is one of the best, most engaging novels I’ve read in a long time. There were times when I didn’t even realize I was turning pages. I’d look at a page number, and some time later, a hundred or more pages had been turned. It’s visceral, it’s violent, it’s emotional, and it’s powerful. Yanagihara has a way with words and development that kept me reading long after I should have been in bed. She makes us care immensely for Jude and his friends before she delivers the hefty, difficult stuff, so that makes us ache and cry even more. She is unflinching in her descriptions of abuse, of love, of friendship, of the ache of life, and I couldn’t put it down.

Read it, laugh and cry a little, and live that little life.