Jenna Starborn [Mass Market Paperback]

Sharon Shinn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2002

Jenna Starborn was created out of frozen embryonic tissue, a child unloved and unwanted. Yet she has grown up with a singularly sharp mind—and a heart that warms to those she sees as less fortunate than herself. This novel takes us into Jenna Starborn's life, to a planet called Fieldstar, and to a property called Thorrastone—whose enigmatic lord will test the strength of that tender and compassionate heart.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The author of the Samaria trilogy (Archangel, etc.) offers a moving, if somewhat less introspective, retelling of Jane Eyre that is sure to appeal to SF readers with a taste for romance. The product of the planet Baldus's gen-tanks, Jenna Starborn is used to a life of pain and privation. After being educated at a technical school that focuses on the growth of the mind to the exclusion of all else, Jenna accepts a job as a nuclear reactor maintenance technician at remote Thorrastone Park, owned by the wealthy Everett Ravenbeck. She becomes indispensable to the household and to Everett. Despite their difference in stations Jenna is only a half-citizen they fall in love. After a long, difficult courtship made longer because of the perversity of the two principals, the two plan to marry. But at the wedding, Jenna receives a terrible shock: Everett has another wife. Unable to live with him as his wife without being married, Jenna flees to a remote planet, where she falls in with a family that provides help and aid to travelers. She's on the verge of deciding whether to marry another and go with him to colonize a new planet when she hears Everett's voice, impossibly calling from afar. Reader, need we say what happens next? Jane Eyre fans will enjoy tracking the character and plot parallels. Shinn fans will enjoy the way the author perfectly captures the tone and color of Bront‰ while maintaining Jenna's unique voice. Best of all, Jenna's narrative makes us feel joy in her love, sorrow in her despair, numb in her shock. (Apr. 2)Forecast: Unlike Jasper Fforde's satiric literary fantasy, The Eyre Affair (Forecasts, Dec. 17), this novel is targeted primarily at a female audience. Ad coverage in Romantic Times and Shinn's established reputation in the romance field will ensure plenty of crossover support.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Conceived in the gen-tanks on the planet Baldus and rejected by the woman who commissioned her birth, Jenna Starborn finds a career as a nuclear generator technician on the inhospitable planet Fieldstar. At the estate of Thorrastone Park, Jenna finds solace and friendship in the household's staff; she also succumbs to a forbidden attraction to the mysterious master of the house, Everett Ravenbeck, and finds her life changed forever. The author of the Samaria trilogy (Archangel, Jovah's Angel, and The Alleluia Files) has adapted the classic plot of Jane Eyre, setting it in a distant future where money and status divide humanity into citizens and half-citizens, and where breaking social barriers becomes a near impossibility. This hybrid blend of sf drama and Gothic romance features a strong-willed, genuinely likable heroine and belongs in most sf collections.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 381 pages
• Publisher: Ace Trade; Ace trade paperback ed edition (April 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 044100900X
• ISBN-13: 978-0441009008
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #831,728 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sharon Shinn is a journalist who works for a trade magazine. Her first novel, The Shapechanger's Wife, was selected by Locus as the best first fantasy novel of 1995. She has won the William C. Crawford Award for Outstanding New Fantasy Writer, and was twice nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. A graduate of Northwestern University, she has lived in the Midwest most of her life.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Familiar in Good and Bad Ways, May 12, 2002

By 

Tasha B. (Colorado) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jenna Starborn (Mass Market Paperback)

I love Sharon Shinn, and I loved JANE EYRE when I read it in high school, so I was certain that I would love this book! And, for the most part, I did enjoy it, but I have to agree with some of the other reviewers here that it isn't Shinn's best work. In fact, I honestly find myself wondering what possessed her to write JENNA STARBORN at all.

The novel starts out very intruigingly, with Jenna as a "manufactured" human mistreated by the human family she lives with. In this part of the novel, there are some pretty strong resemblances to the Bronte novel, but also a nice twist to make the story fresh and original.

Once Jenna goes to Fieldstar, however, all attempts at any stretch of originality, creativity, or imagination are almost entirely demolished. As I said before, I loved JANE EYRE; but if I want to read JANE EYRE, I'll read Bronte. I was expecting and anticipating Shinn to put her own twist on the basic premise of the Bronte classic--young woman falls in love with brooding employer, who turns out to be hiding a terrible secret--but I was disappointed in the way she followed J.E. so incredibly closely--she hardly even bothered to change the characters' names!

Plus, Shinn is a good writer, but not as good as Charlotte Bronte was, especially at this type of fiction. Mr. Rochester/Ravenbeck talks as if his life is the climatic scene of a really bad late Victorian melodrama, and I couldn't possibly take him seriously. On the whole, in face, the characterizations were not very good, even for Jenna's character. I felt as if the book just skimmed the surface of her life and I still didn't really know her by the end, or even if I would care to know her. She seems more of a passive observer of her life than even Jane Eyre was.

Basically, JENNA STARBORN was more like reading a scene-by-scene copy of JANE EYRE, rather than a "twist" on the original story, which makes me wonder why Shinn even bothered writing it. If you like JANE EYRE, you will like this book, no doubt about it; but as a work standing on its own it was disappointing.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars It's all been done before...and done better the first time, July 28, 2002

By 

Jennifer Mo - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jenna Starborn (Mass Market Paperback)

I couldn't finish this book.

I skimmed the first two thirds of it, and then skipped to the last fifteen pages. And yet I have an extremely good idea of what happened in the interim: that is, nothing significantly different from the plot of Jane Eyre. Yawn.

When I first heard that Sharon Shinn was writing a retelling of Jane Eyre in a sort of space opera setting, I was quite enthused, being a fan of Sharon Shinn, Jane Eyre (moderately, anyway), and space opera. In previous books, Shinn has managed to make even things I usually avoid in books, i.e. religion and romance-oriented plots, appealing. Unfortunately, Jenna Starborn isn't so much a retelling of Jane Eyre as it is a translation of it into a futuristic setting. Some passages between Roch--Ravenbeck and Jenna, are lifted virtually verbatim from Charlotte Bronte's gothic romance. Apart from the SF setting, and a few of Jenna's biographical details, nothing much is different. (Well, there *is* that awkward insertion of a sort of feminist Transcendentalist religion.) And some of the similarities, such as the use of the phrase, "Dear Reeder," come across as grossly self indulgent and not at all clever or witty.

Following Jane Eyre's plot too closely does absolutely terrible things to characterization. Essentially, Jenna is an incredibly bland futuristic Jane Eyre, with more interesting origins and a brilliance at science. Her story isn't particularly interesting or remotely suspenseful because every detail is already known to someone who has read Jane Eyre. But-- even worse-- she's not half as convincing a character as Jane Eyre. Jenna's not dislikable, but she's *boring.* Sharon Shinn is usually excellent at characterization, but confined by the motivations and actions of Bronte's characters, she fails to create any three dimensional characters of her own. No one escapes being a pale and unsatisfactory imitation of one of Bronte's characters.

The setting, too, compared to that of her previous books, is rather underdeveloped. It's the usual generic space opera setting, with some indication of space travel and improved medical technology and an unfamiliar religious order. Each of these has been explored better in other Shinn books; here, they all get shoved into the background of the plot and the plights of the characters, which would be all right except that those aspects are singularly uncompelling.

I was initially puzzled why the lack of original plot and therefore suspense bothered me so much; fairy tale retellings, after all, make up one of my favorite subgenres, and no one can deny that those are derivative. But I suspect that it's because good fairy tale retellings expand, explore, and add subtlety and meaning; Jenna Starborn does nothing for Jane Eyre. Even my favorite scene in Jane Eyre-- that of the fortuneteller-- in Jenna Starborn becomes quite forgettable. Everything that I found overly melodramatic and sappy in Jane Eyre is even more cringeworthy in Jenna Starborn. The original's faults are exaggerated, its virtues diminished.

The one thing that did genuinely amuse me was the inclusion of a character named Janet Ayerson (the name!), who is the tutor to Ravenbeck's young ward. Janet embarks upon a course that will be instantly familiar to any Pride and Prejudice fan, given the deliberate similarity of certain passages. In such a derivative Jane Eyre retelling, the inclusion of this allusion was pleasantly surprising. If the entire book had been full of sly literary references from a variety of sources, I would have enjoyed it a good deal more.

Released about the same time, Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair is a much, much more rewarding novel that also deals with Jane Eyre (and pet dodos, Martin Chuzzlewit, Henry James, and the Shakespeare authorship question). Jenna Starborn should be read only by those patient enough to sit through-- yes, a Jane Eyre clone with spaceships-- or those who haven't read Jane Eyre at all. I hope Sharon Shinn will return to more original subject matter; I don't think I could read it if she chose to 'retell' Pride and Prejudice similarly!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Eyre Erred, August 25, 2005

By 

Snark Shark (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jenna Starborn (Paperback)

Charlotte Bronte doesn't deserve this.

I have no doubt that Sharon Shinn meant well; I've read interviews where she's talked about how she adores period authors, and has read "Jane Eyre" so many times she knows certain passages by heart. But her attempt to 'futurize' that amazing novel is a well-meant failure: awkward, confusing, and overall, uninteresting.

Jenna Starborn is, of course, Shinn's heroine. Jenna has no real family: she was created from raw genetic material for a woman known as Rently (the infamous Aunt Reed), who later rejected Jenna in favor of her own son and never formally adopted the girl. This meant that Jenna was only a half-citizen, or "half-cit," in a society where citizenship status (in levels that go from Five (lowest) to One (highest), with half-cits the lowest of low) determines one's ability to own property, hold down a job, etc.

So Jenna is unlucky enough to enter into a hierarchal society with strict separations between the classes, where she herself is barely considered a person. She escapes her aunt's and makes a place for herself at Lora Tech (Lowood, anyone?), a prestigious trade school, and becomes a nuclear technician. After graduating she is eager for work, and accepts a position at Thorrastone (Thornfeild) Park, employed by a Mr. Everett Ravenbeck (Edward Rochester). The trouble begins when sparks begin to fly between Jenna and Ravenbeck, who is a Level One Citizen and therefore part of the universal elite.

The truth is, I would have enjoyed this book much, much better if it hadn't tried so desperately to recreate the events, characters, and language of the original book SO CLOSELY -- every event and interaction, even whole passages, are preserved as much as possible. But "Jane Eyre" is the kind of book where every piece fits snugly together to create a wonderful whole; Shinn's machinations with adapting the book to a different setting were jarring, especially when her altering of themes and characterizations was just enough to create total confusion. It would have been better if Shinn had simply stuck to the central idea -- smart girl vies for love in a hostile world -- and taken it from there.

Instead, we have an adaptation that tries to be clever and inventive, but fails miserably. For instance, Shinn's world is not fleshed-out enough to convince us that Jenna is being truly radical. The idea of upper-level citizens marrying a half-cit seems, perhaps, but not unheard of. (Shinn expressly mentions early on that one can ascend levels of citizenship though several means -- one of them being marriage.) It's nowhere near the romantic impossibility presented in "Jane Eyre": of Rochester, a man of wealth and breeding, aligning himself with a plain, penniless governess with absolutely no family to speak of. And if you take away those extremes, you abandon much of the conflict and tension that made the original so absorbing.

And Jenna is nowhere near the interesting heroine that Jane was, with the spiritual, emotional, and moral struggles which pervaded "Jane Eyre." Jenna comes into her own faith effortlessly: she reads a PanEquist pamphlet while still at Rently's (how did that woman get it?), and is immediately converted to this pseudo-pagan equality-for-everyone-even-flowers Goddess religion. So when Everett asks her to live with him, unmarried, her only reason for saying no is reputation and honor. Which doesn't make much sense, either: why would Jenna care so deeply about the values of a society that she knows to be deeply flawed? And there's nothing in her religion that speaks against the idea.

Again, very different, and very boring, compared to the original, where the man Jane loved -- the man who loved HER, when she thought she would be incapable of inspiring love -- is so desperate to keep her he tempts her with the deepest moral and spiritual sin. Doesn't look good for Ravenbeck, either. Rochester was willing to take himself and Jane to hell to stay by her side; Ravenbeck won't even "shut down" his cyborg of a wife.

Again, it's not that the characters of the book are awful and boring by themselves; it's just that, in comparison to the original, they SEEM that way. And Shinn has so closely followed the original text that comparisons are inevitable.

I suppose the final conclusion is: don't mess with the classics. (There's a reason they're classic.) And Ms. Shinn is too talented to be copying others' works.