Charlotte Brontë / Sherri Browning Erwin, Jane Slayre

The mash-up style of book has been popping up all over the place, starting in 2009 with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Jane Austen / Seth Grahame-Smith). All the rehashed books (Mansfield Park and Mummies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters) are written with varying degrees of sensitivity for the original work.

Sherri Browning Erwin has done quite well in keeping the style, pace and language of Jane Eyre, and isn't too heavy-handed with her blending of the supernatural.

Jane Eyre is one of my favourite classics, along with Mansfield Park, so I was a bit nervous when I picked this up. But apart from the odd tong-in-cheek phrase like 'stake-o-matic,' that really make you come out of the story and remember that it isn't the original, the novel has all the major points that attracted me to it in the first place.

Lonely orphan Jane Slayer is sent from her uncaring (supernatural!) aunt and her family to an orphanage school where she learns her destiny and gets her training as a slayer. After eight years at school Jane finds a place as a private governess to the ward of the enigmatic Mr. Rochester, and discoveres all is not as it seems at Thornfield Hall.

I liked this book. To my mind it was not so much changed as added to.