This one hurts. I love Jane Eyre, and was looking so forward to this darker take on an already somewhat dark story.

The first 150ish pages were wonderful. They followed Jane's life from her early childhood all the way through her boarding school years and the first few years after she left school. In that time, she murders a handful of men who hurt and threatened her and the people she cared about. This was all very interesting. In her mind (and honestly, I see where she's coming from) all of her actions were justified. Even so, she feels varying levels of remorse for these different murders, depending on her relationship with the victim in question. I really enjoy her friendship with Clarke, who she loves like a sister.

Unfortunately, after the first 150 pages, the pacing and story slam on the brakes of any potential momentum and spend the next 200 pages talking about a lukewarm mystery and a bunch of characters that are not fleshed out at all. They also spend pages and pages on exposition that is wind-numbingly boring.

Also, I really disliked the romance. I just didn't connect with them as a couple at all. I also hated that every time Jane is talking to mr. Singh or Charles, they throw in a bunch of words that needed annotations on the bottom so we knew what they meant. I feel like they wouldn't use those words when they are having a conversation with a native English speaker because they'd have to stop every ten seconds and explain with all the other words meant, but they didn't. And somehow Jane understood everything they were talking about.

Honestly, the writing in general leaves something to be desired. It felt like the author was trying too hard to make the language and sentences sound authentic to the 1840s/1850s, when this book is supposed to take place. Unfortunately, this leads to several nonsensical passages. All of these flowery phrases with long words are present, but they don't add anything to the story, except to add confusion. It also affected the pacing of this book, especially through the middle section. I also found it silly that she tried to use all of this flowery language to make it authentic to the time period, but then had her characters doing and saying things that just would not be done or said. It was a big disconnect for me.

At the end of the day, this book was boring. I wanted to love it. I didn't. Now I need a fluffy contemporary to my mind off of it.