[Uh, this review is actually from last week. Sorry.]

Sharon Shinn is an award-winning (the John W. Campbell Award for Best First Novel, for The Shape-Changer’s Wife) and best-selling author; she has written a handful of spec-fic series for adults, and one for children published by Firebird, the first volume of which I reviewed here. One of the series starts with Archangel; I recommend it, unless one hates cliffhangers. Another series starts with Mystic and Rider; that one is more recent. She lives in Missouri, to my knowledge, and attended Northwestern University in Evansville, Il. Most of her novels are popular with those who read romance novels as well as those who read science fiction and fantasy; she manages to blend elements of all three into her works.

Jenna Starborn is a retelling of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, set in the distant future, when humans have terraformed and colonized a good deal of other planets, apparently without meeting any aliens. The story will be familiar to most readers: a young woman, without friends and family, takes a job in a remote area in a Gothic-ly appropriate manor, with a fascinating owner who, unfortunately, is many social levels above the poor young woman. She falls in love with him, discovers something unfortunate, and leaves. The conceit in this novel is that Jenna Starborn was a child conceived in a tank for a childless woman, who eventually finds herself able to get pregnant and basically abandons Jenna, leaving her without official citizenship in a world highly stratified by citizenship classes. She gets a scholarship to a technical academy and becomes a nuclear technician, eventually landing a job at the mining operations of the erstwhile Mr. Rochester (Mr. Ravenbeck), and the story proceeds.

The story is told in a style that isn’t exactly that of Ms. Bronte, but not that of the rest of Ms. Shinn’s books. It appears that she was attempting to ape the style of Ms. Bronte, but not to the point of writing in a style that sounds fake or uncomfortable. I can guess that the language will have varying levels of success for different readers, but I found it warm. The society she has constructed is also one that will result in a similar situation to Jane Eyre’s; it is made up of five different levels of citizenship, plus half-cits and cyborgs. Interactions between each of the levels are highly regulated, and it is assumed that everyone lower than a level-one (top-level) citizen is constantly working towards improving one’s social standing. Only with this division will the social commentary of a Jane Eyre or Jenna’s PanEquism be necessary.

Some parts of the book didn’t quite work for me. Since I already knew the plot, and how it was going to end, it was up to the characters, settings, and subtle differences between the books to keep me interested. The characters were not bad, although I wanted to yell at Jenna occasionally for falling in love with such a ridiculous man (Mr. Ravenbeck/Rochester). Of course, I wanted to yell at Jane Eyre, too, so I don’t know if that makes much difference. The settings were pretty interesting, but with weird omissions. Did the explorers ever run into other (alien) races? How did people end up being so different from what they are now, in terms of morality? How, also, did we run so far backwards on women’s rights, especially in the upper classes? Jenna’s PanEquism, with its emphasis that all things are created equal, seems to imbued with a strange sort of fatalism, because in my experience, those who believe that all are created equal general eschew the consumption of animal products, and Jenna doesn’t.

The social differences between the classes were both subtle and not. Jenna, for example, being a half-cit, has to learn an occupation, and while there is no stigma against her being a nuclear technician related to her gender, she almost always shows up in the book wearing pants, and the color gray. Upper-class women are almost always wearing dresses; they wear bright colors, and very few of them have the exact faces and bodies with which they were born. However, some things do cross social barriers; all are expected to excel at certain games, for example, and they seem to eat similar food, if in different quantities and preservation. (It’s not as if rich people eat steak and poor people eat nutritional supplements, for example. All eat solid food.)

All in all, I enjoyed it, but it might have been a bit too contrived for my taste. Those who really enjoyed Jane Eyre might enjoy this novel quite a bit, unless they’re purists; those who are looking for eminently consistent world-building, however, will find this a bit shallow. 3.25/5 stars.