Review: Brightly Burning

Brightly Burning by Alexa Donne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I received an advanced reading copy of this book from a friend, which is the only reason that I read it to be honest.

I'm not very into YA and have many, MANY, issues with Jane Eyre so I would not have picked up this book on my own. I'm glad that I did read it though. The world building is engaging and the Jane character, Stella, shows a lot more self agency than Eyre did, which was one of the things I didn't care for in that book.

Shortening the life expectancy of the society helped bolster the believably of the romance, as well as dropping the Rochester character, Hugo, age to 19. Having the main characters 17 and 19 gives a little bit of wiggle room when it comes to accepting some of the stupid behaviors and choices that they make. There is also less brooding and angst than in Eyre even though Hugo does his hardest to bring the drinking and mood swings. And perhaps that's the weakest part of this book, when Donne doubles down on the incorporation of scenes and plot points from Eyre. The party/parlor parts especially had me raising my eyebrow pointedly. Although Donne uses Hugo's rank as captain and employer as a way for him to get Stella to do what he wants, the fact that she does after showing so much backbone in other things made me irritated.

The secondary plots helped to take some of the edge off my annoyance, I felt like the science fiction and mystery parts would have gotten along nicely without the Eyre aspects if they needed to.

However, it still comes down to the same problem that Jane Eyre had, the heroine is more interesting than the hero and you just want her to go out and be her awesome self without him. Although the feeling I was left with at the end of this book was just mild eye-rolling at her as opposed to full-on book throwing that happened at the end of Eyre.

Engaging, fast read. Bogged down a little by the source material but the setting and tweaks to the plot were good.

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