From Kirkus Reviews:
A BREATH OF EYRE [STARRED REVIEW]
Author: Mont, Eve Marie
This richly satisfying tale of first and last love transcends its genre—not another breathless, fan-fiction take on a literary classic but an intertextual love letter.
Raised by a distant father and ex-debutante stepmother, shy, bookish Emma misses the mother she barely remembers. At Emma’s 16th birthday party, her mother’s college roommate, Simona, gives her a copy of Jane Eyre. Emma finds Simona’s son, Gray, disturbingly attractive, but he dates an A-list girl at Lockwood, the boarding school Emma, a scholarship student, attends. The alliance she forges with her new roommate—fellow scholarship student and Haitian science whiz Michelle—heartens both until, struck by lightning, Emma wakes up to find herself Jane Eyre. Though her world is comforting at first, Mr. Rochester’s controlling ways trouble Emma, who feels deepening compassion for Bertha Mason. (Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea is clearly a referent here.) She fights her way home, but unresolved issues and mysteries, especially the connection between Jane’s world and Emma’s mother, draw her back. With evocative settings and compassionately drawn characters, this trilogy opener offers affectionate insight into the gifts literature gives readers. If treasured books have the power to change us, it’s a two-way street. As we change, so does our relationship to those books and so, in a sense, we change them.
A smart and rewarding ode to literature. (Fantasy. 12 & up)
And from Publishers Weekly:
A BREATH OF EYRE
Eve Marie Mont. Kensington/KTeen, $9.95 trade paper (352p)
ISBN 978-0-7582-6948-5
Adult author Mont’s (Free to a Good Home) enjoyable YA
debut, first in a planned series based on classic literature, introduces
16-year-old Emma Townsend, a student at the elite Lockwood Prep. At school,
Emma and her roommate are taunted for being scholarship students, and she has a
crush on her English teacher as well as a confusing friendship with Gray, a
reformed bad boy. When Emma is struck by lightning and wakes up in the novel
Jane Eyre as the governess herself, the memories of her life at Lockwood soon
fade as she falls in love with the dashing Mr. Rochester, “two lost souls
trapped in a gloomy mansion together—one haunted by a past he could not
relinquish, the other haunted by a past she could not remember.” Emma senses
that she has unfinished business in both worlds (in which characters cleverly
mirror each other), and she travels between them to discover truths about her
past and future. Brontë fans should appreciate this romantic, time-slipping
reimagining that addresses finding a voice in writing and in life. Ages 14–up.
Agent: April Eberhardt, Kimberley Cameron & Associates. (Apr.)
