Sherri Browning ErwinCríticas

This is first of the paranormalized classics I've gotten to read (mostly, I'll admit, because I managed to snag a free copy from sfsignal.com). I found to be pretty good, page-turning fun.

The original classic is not one that I've read (other than a quick skim of the first chapter and a recent watching of the 1944 film version with Joan Fontaine and Orson Wells), so I can't fully vouch for the harmony of this version with the plot, characters, tone, or style of Miss Brontë's volume. But I can say that it satisfied my own inner ear and expectations.

The Buffy-zation of Jane and her world was mostly seamless. Once one accepted the fact that vampires, zombies, and ultimately a werewolf or two inhabited her world, allowing her to become a kung fu fighter in petticoats was an easy step. At a few points I felt the author threatening to strain my suspension of disbelief. But these quickly resolved and the story continued with consonance.

There are a bunch of these books coming out now (I've even spotted one based on Huckleberry Finn). It's tempting to read them all. But I'm certain I could not survive on an exclusive diet of this dish for an extended period. I nonetheless plan to snack on a few in the coming months.

too long, great hero and heroine, good plot

I REALLY wanted to read this when it was first released. Just the title switch of 'Jane Slayre' and that cover! I was in. Been sitting on my TBR shelves for ages. But with the crazy crisis happening, the least I can do is indulge and read the books I want to read the most, in the hopes that I can focus better, instead of doing what I usually do; which is create this vast mathematical equation in my head of what I should be reading based on various factors. So yes, this book is wonderful. Imagine Jane Eyre and Buffy as one character. YES. It is the basic premise, story layout and characters of the amazing, beloved original 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Bronte, but full of monsters. Let's be honest: the original 'Jane Eyre' already contains a few monsters and the original Jane Eyre is also a badass. The concepts are seamless -- fits like a custom made lace Victorian glove to Jane's tiny hand. Honestly, I wish there was MORE monster mayhem. The writer has a lovely enough way with words herself, doesn't really need to adapt the books of others, but nothing can really beat the purple-prose-before-it-was-out-of-fashion that is the writing style of the Bronte sisters. I have such love for the original, so it's difficult to tell if I can separate this story from the original. But this was fun - a great way to revisit.½

I liked it well enough. Though I have read better mash ups.

Putting beloved characters and plots into different contexts is delightful when it casts a new light on what is already known, thereby deepening the existing knowledge. This is a hard thing to do-- too much novelty and the characters become strangers, too little and the additional material feels artificial and poorly integrated. Jane Slayre, as a book, is rather odd. I think the supernatural context is well-integrated into the world building, but the necessity of putting Jane through all the plot hoops of the old book means her character can't change or react much to the zombies, vampyres, and etc she encounters. Very frustrating.

I had a rough time getting through this

I had a rough time getting through this

I Loved it - hilarious in parts, interesting in others, very fun (and well-done)

This one felt different as it was a widow and a second son that fell in love.

Eve married someone not of her class and was disowned. She loved her husband and then he died. Now she is back in England. She was, well honestly normal ;) A good woman.

Marcus has PTSD and has left the life of a soldier. He uses his rage as a fighter. He was also normal, it feels like I am at a loss for words here but they were both normal, nice, he had small issues and they fell in love.

The setting is 1906 so yes Edwardian romance was another thing that was different, and interesting.

But life is never easy. There is suspense in this novel too as, oh I shall not say, but something from the past comes haunting them. And a bit of drama as Marcus's sister in law tries to play matchmaker and not between him and Eve.

A nice romance with a suspenseful twist.

Taking the bones of the plot (cruel aunt, boarding school for orphans, Mr. Rochester), this places Jane in a world were she is raised by the vampire Reeds, learns to kill zombies at Lowood and finds that Mr. Rochester's secret is a bit more complex than in the original story.
The fun of monster slaying is worked in, making Jane a fearless fighter while still leaving in her problems with money and love.

First in the Thornbrook Park series - I picked this up because we had a query about the Anglo/Boer War concentration camps and it was mentioned that one of the characters in this book had been there. I was really hoping for some more historical details about the camps, but was disappointed. Widowed Eve Kendal has returned to England from India and is staying with her friend at Thornbrook Park whilst she tries to sort out her financial position - just where is her husband's money? Captain Marcus Thorne, war hero, is plagued by his war experiences and has turned to boxing as a way to deal with his anger. He is also trying to take care of the family of his friend who was killed in the war. He visits his brother at Thornbrook Park. His brother's wife is trying to make a match between Marcus and her sister Alice, but Marcus and is drawn to Eve, the couple starting an affair and also looking into her missing investments. When the investigation turns nasty and Eve's life is threatened, will Marcus be able to save her in time? Okay read.

Second in the Thornbrook Park series (I haven't read the first). Daughter of an Earl, Lady Alice is staying with her married older sister Sophia. Logan Winthrop is the second son of a Baron and works as an estate manager for Sophia and her husband. Sophia is set on getting Alice married, and married well. However Alice doesn't want to marry, she has a life of adventure planned once she comes into her inheritance in three years time. In the meantime she wants to have an affair with Logan so she knows what it's all about. Logan has a troubled past and is quite good at rebuffing Alice's attempts at seduction. Then there is the Earl of Ralston who is set on marrying Alice and who just won't take no for an answer. Okay read.½

I continue to enjoy the Thornbrook Park Romance Series. Like the first book, An Affair Downstairs is very well written. In Book 2, Lady Alice is still very much against marriage. All she wants is a whirlwind romance with the mysterious estate manager, Logan Winthrop, so she can cross off lovemaking from her bucket list before traveling to India. Unfortunately, her sister, Lady Sophia, is determined to see her sister married to title and fortune, forcing Alice to juggle her seduction plans while thwarting marriage proposals from bores and handsome earls.

Sherri Browning did a great job of developing the relationship between Alice and Logan. With each chapter, their affection for one another became more evident. Their reactions to certain situations (no spoilers) were believable and enjoyable to read. It was also fun to see Agatha, Eve and Marcus from Book 1 being very involved in Alice and Logan's story, especially Agatha.

I cannot wait to read the next installment in this series.

I have this teeny weeny soft spot in my heart for mash-up fiction. Vampires, zombies, werewolves, sea monsters...okay, not so much sea monsters. Although if someone were to mash up Jane Austen and Jaws, I'd probably be there. But because this soft spot is so small, there's not much room for challenging what I like.

If you write a book with any one of these aforementioned beings in the title, I kind of expect it to heavily feature that, and that alone. No one wants to read a book called Gatsby: Werewolf Hunter (I made that up) and have it be partially about zombies. It just doesn't fit. Universes should not cross unless explicitly stated.

So here's where it gets tricky: Jane Slayre. Now...I think "slayer...or slayre" and generally think vampires. Unless it's Buffy. Also, the bloodied heroine on the cover (an edited image of Charlotte Brontë) is holding a stake. And on the cover, right below the title, it says "the literary classic with a blood-sucking twist." Vampires, right?

There are! There are vampires! Aunt Reed and her progeny are all children of the night. The book starts off right. Until it veers into the very wrong. If you've never read the source material, it's a pretty big book and it's pretty dense. This means two things: 1) there's not a whole lot of room to play. If you're going to retain most of the source material AND add supernatural elements, you've gotta integrate it very well and keep any additions slim, and 2) you have to make it move; no one wants to read a 400-page mash up of Jane Eyre with dead spaces (haha). Unfortunately, co-author Sherri Browning Erwin took the latter fact to mean that she had to pack it as full as possible with supernatural beings.

So along with vampires, you've got zombies and werewolves. Let me say that again: vampires and zombies and werewolves (oh my). This makes the poor book just fall apart. If she'd stuck with one lore to kind of tie the whole thing together (one ring to rule them all, if you will) it could have worked. But you've got Jane training herself to kill vampires (with the aid of her slayer/Slayre blood of course!), a school teacher training her to kill zombies (which becomes necessary because, along with Brocklehurst - Bokorhurst, here - being a religious zealot/ asshole, he's also apparently a witch doctor who makes zombies), and then some nonsense about her slayer/Slayre uncle also happening to know shit about werewolves.

It's just...it's a lot. It's a whole lot. And we've got enough going on. I mean...Jane Eyre is already a gothic novel. There is already a sort-of-ghost, and a crazy wife in the attic who burns shit down. Not to mention all the horrible human beings who already play a part in the original. And it's so Emo, it doesn't need any help. Yet here we are. Trying to make things more interesting. It doesn't need it! All this additional stuff does is make Jane more of a bad-ass (which doesn't fit, because she remains emotionally immature) and make Rochester more of a wimp (which he's not!).

This is not me being elitist. I mean, I can be, but this is not that. Mash-up fiction is supposed to be fun. This is not fun. This isn't as bad as Amanda Grange's Mr. Darcy, Vampyr, but it's still not fun. Good mash-up should still retain the potent qualities of the original. For example, in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Elizabeth is pretty bad-ass because of her zombie-killing training in China. But Elizabeth was already pretty bad-ass and put Darcy in his place more than once. It works! This doesn't. This is just messy in all kinds of ways. No more, please.½

After reading [b:Pride and Prejudice and Zombies|5899779|Pride and Prejudice and Zombies|Seth Grahame-Smith|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255569929s/5899779.jpg|6072122], I know I swore off of these classics/paranormal mashups...but [b:Jane Eyre|10210|Jane Eyre|Charlotte Brontë|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266450134s/10210.jpg|2977639] is my all-time fave, so I give in. I'm not sure why I want to see my favorite work of literature (possibly) destroyed, but I do.

**

Ok, just finished it. I liked it more than P&P&Z, I'll say that much. The vampyre thing actually worked pretty well with the Reeds, and Bertha as a werewolf wasn't bad either. Overall, the gothic tone of the original novel lent itself to the trend much more than P&P did. However, a lot of things jarred me out of the story continually - things like the "stake-o-matic" that she and St. John invent. I think subtle would have been better, and there were a lot of times when it was anything but.

Set in 1906, this book was a refreshing read full of romance and suspense. I liked that Eve and Marcus were not the usual H/h found in historical romances. As a widow, Eve had the freedom denied to young girls and spinsters. Marcus was a second son. As such, there were many opportunities for them to be alone in each other's company without raising too many eyebrows.

There was also an element of mystery to the story as Eve and Marcus began to investigate her husband's missing investments in an Indian diamond mine. People connected to the mine were going missing and Marcus was worried that Eve's life was in grave danger. There were so many possibilities for who was out to get Eve that it kept me guessing to the end.

I highly recommend this book and look forward to reading other books by Sherri Browning.

This is the third of the recent group of classic romance/horror humor mash-ups I've read and it is the very best of them. It succeeds in being a fun, light read because it avoided the traps of the almost-good "Pride & Prejudice & Zombies" and the waste of paper and time that was "Sense & Sensibility & Sea-monsters". No cheap jokes, no junior high sex puns, no glaring and stupid mistakes in the additions, no missed opportunities, and no pointless, tedious grafting onto the original story. The humor is dry, understated, and dovetailed nicely with the original voice of the main character.

That Ms. Erwin not only has read Jane Eyre, but understood and appreciated it, was apparent in her handling of the original material. (I think part of that understanding and intelligence is indicated by the proper spelling of her first name). She maintained qualities of the original characters and, while indicating the humor of the new situations in which she placed them, she never ridiculed or insulted them (I particularly liked her transformation of Mr. Brocklehurst -- it was everything I could desire). I didn't have a single eye rolling moment and my curiosity about how the story would develop and end remained high until the last few pages answered all.

I've read Jane Eyre several times since my first foray in 6th grade. When I first read about this book, I speculated that the Brontes might be better suited for such a mash-up. Their writings are much more emotional, excessive, and interwoven with Byronic Romanticism and Gothic motifs. These made room for adding in the changes without overstretching credulity (not the case with the two Austen mash-ups, which required much subtler humor and, being tighter and less prone to emotional broad strokes, had less room for what was sledged into them.)

Quite a good, fun, light summer read.

Jane Slayre:
The Literary Classic with a Blood-Sucking Twist
By Sherri Browning Erwin and Charlotte Bronte

Jane Slayre was orphaned by vampires shortly after she was born, when her uncle came to retrieve her he was attacked and turned into a vampire on the way home, though he was able to protect the infant from the blood thirsty fiends. This is how Jane Slayre found herself living in a home full of vampires, after her cousin attacks her leaving her bitten and almost completely drained of blood she soon becomes determined to rid the world of these abominable creatures.

This was a great re-telling of Jane Eyre, full of vampires, werewolves, even zombies. So far this is one of my favorite “quirk classics.” The author did a wonderful job bringing to life a new world and blending in the characters from a classic setting producing an interesting and captivating novel. In the original novel you truly hate some of the characters, that is not as substantial in this novel but you have a more solid reason to dislike these people, such as students being transformed into zombies. I would definitely recommend giving this novel to someone who shows a lack of interest in an original classic it is sure to make you want to compare it to the first and in the process draw the reader into a classic world that knows no bounds.

For More Reviews be sure to visit my blogs at:
http://reflectionsofabookworm.wordpress.com/
http://bookwormrflects8.blogspot.com/

Normally, I turn up my nose at literary mash-up books, but the local librarian, whom I trust implicitly, recommended it because I so thoroughly enjoyed Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.I'm glad I chose to read this book. It doesn't destroy the classic story line, it just gives an extra element to it. Give it a chance.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but that doesn't always mean that it works.This was my first classic and horror "mash-up" that wasn't from Quirk Classics, and now I'm regretting it. What I loved so much about "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" as well as "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" was that it took the whole of Austen's text and just added fun absurd things to it, only altering the original as necessary to fit the crazy additions.Not so with "Jane Slayre," I'm afraid. I have to re-read the original (which I may well do) but I know from some quick scene checks that a lot was simply hacked out of the original or re-written with no obvious reason but length. (Except for some parts that were just entirely redone.) It was cut down to a shorter size, to include the additions, and perhaps make it more easily understood by a modern audience. That's not honoring the original with some fun insanity. That's mutilating it.I am not so much a purist as to not appreciate the classic and quirky mixed together, but in this one, many of the things that were taken out were crucial to the soul of the story. It shows, to me, that Ms. Browning Erwin thoroughly missed the point of the original and the "mash-up" exercise. These alterations gutted Jane's character in a way that being a "plucky demon-slaying heroine" couldn't truly make up for and gutted the love story in a way that can't entirely be forgiven.I've given it two stars simply for the fact that I did manage to read the whole thing and didn't (though only narrowly) throw it across the room. And because she didn't entirely ruin the ending.

listened to as an audiobook from the library - Jane Eyre already has many supernatural elements to it, so it lends itself enormously to this type of mash-up novel. Jane was raised by vampire relatives, who did not suck her blood because they thought they would get sick from drinking commoner blood. She receives a message from her uncle's ghost, who tells her she is decended from a long line of vampire slayers. She goes to a boarding school which turns out to be run by a bokor (voodoo witch doctor) who is actually running a zombie farm. And so on. Really excellent; I liked it a great deal. The action sequences were great. Also, listening to it on audiobook was great because it is long and this way I did not have to worry about all the other books I could be reading in the same time period. Plus the narrator does good voices.½

While Grave Expectations isn't laugh-out-loud humorous like the first supernatural-classic mashups, the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies series, it is still an enjoyable take on Dickens' 1860 novel. (Based on my one brief encounter with Dickens' writing - David Copperfield - this version is much less tedious and confusing than the original, too.) While the werewolves, vampires, and zombies play clear roles in the story, Dickens' original purpose in writing the novel shines through should readers bother to think about it. This makes Grave Expectations both a nice alternative for reluctant readers struggling through Dickens' prose (though of course it cannot completely replace reading the actual Great Expectations) and a cool, creative companion piece to for anyone who actually made it through the 1860 novel. Though the middle part of the book did seem to lag in plot (I blame Dickens for that), the majority of the book was interesting, and it appeared that Erwin sticks to the original plot pretty well. In the world of classic/monster mashups, Grave Expectations falls in between completely fun (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) and the rather boring, didn't-really-change-much novels (Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim). I often managed to forget that I was reading a parody of another novel, which is always a good sign for the viability of books based on other books.

Jane Slayre is Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel Jane Eyre with the addition of a supernatural element, vampires and werewolves. The story follows basically the same storyline of the classic novel just changed up a bit to include the supernatural fantasy world. I think Browning did an exceptional job of melding the original classic with the new additions and making it very coherent.

The story is about the life of Jane Slayre who is orphaned as a child and sent to live with her relatives who are vampires. Jane later discovers that she is actually a vampire slayer and ends up meeting distant relatives who help her train her slayer skills. She meets a man with whom she falls in love with but he has a terrible secret.

This book was an entertaining twist of a classic and I very much enjoyed the read.

I quite enjoyed this mashup of "Jane Eyre" with monsters! It felt very true to the original storyline and language and managed to insert monsters in what felt like natural places in the original text. The mad Mrs. Rochester as a werewolf was perfect! Overall, a success.

The concept was exciting, but the author doesn't seem to grasp either Jane Eyre or the vampire slaying mythos very well.