by Doyle MacBrayne
Plot Summary:
Jane Eyre Austen has found her perfect match in her new boss, Grayson Poole. Of all the qualities she could desire, the most important is that he’s kind to her mother. Her very sweet, loving, adoring mother whose mind has chosen to remain in the Regency Era. Gray finds himself inexplicably drawn to a young woman who by all conventional standards is too young and peculiar. Gray never believed he would find love again and then Jane Eyre Austen turned his world upside down.
Review:
This was an interesting story in many ways. The story seemed very fanciful and light - definitely chick-lit, but with a tribute to the refined manners of the past in the unusual way Jane and Grayson would talk among themselves. They spoke like in Victorian times, but this book's setting is contemporary which just felt odd to me, especially as they didn't acknowledge it in the beginning, just sort of settled into those speech patterns when they first met. There was a lot of banter and wit, which was great fun and gave their interactions interest but unfortunately little depth. The story is light on character development with a romance that is not subtle at all. It is pretty blatant that they like each other and will get together soon. And the switching of POVs with every chapter was okay (not as well done as I have seen) but to have the POV switch within a chapter was very off-putting. I was sometimes not sure who was speaking, and I felt like the story could have been worked better to have just one POV per chapter.With the title it's expected that the story would combine elements of Jane Eyre and Austen, and the story did that - though with more Eyre and less Austen (they did have Regency balls though) and the "secret" in the story was more translated to a dangerous situation Jane was in, but it wasn't as intriguing as it could have been because the culprit and the resolution were pretty straightforward, no twists or turns really.
While this story felt a little bland, it is a very sweet, straightforward happily ever after romance with a vintage touch that might be appealing to some readers.
