Jane Goes Batty

When selecting books from LibraryThing's Early Reviewer's program, I usually try to avoid later books in a series, since this will mean hunting down and reading other books just so I can give the ARC a fair shake. I did not take such care with this novel, which is in fact the second in a series, following Jane Bites Back. The premise of the series is that Jane Eyre was converted to vampirism by an undead Lord Byron. She is living–at least as much as a vampire can–in a small town and upstate New York (where Byron also resides), managing a book store and trying to establish a literary career under her current alias of Jane Fairfax. Also, she seems to have picked up vampire Charlotte Brönte as a rival along the way. In this book, Jane is struggling with writing her second book while also dealing with a convention of romance readers and the upcoming visit of her boyfriend's mother.

Though I'm neither a fan of Austen-inspired novels or supernatural romance, I thought the book sounded like it might be kooky good fun. It's possible the book would have been more enjoyable had I started with Bites Back, but considering the books weaknesses, I rather doubt that. And the weaknesses here start with the basic premise: vampire Jane Austen. It sounds like a winning, if campy, concept, but the delivery leaves much to be desired. To start with, the novel's concept of vampirism is pretty weak; they are not affected by sunlight, do not look or feel different, can eat food and their hunger for blood is largely just an inconvenience. Without much of a sense of moral peril, the whole concept of vampirism seems largely defanged and bloodless. (Sorry.)

The other problem is Jane herself. I haven't read enough about Ms. Austen to have a firm grasp on her as a person, but what I get from her novels is that she was a keen observer of the social realm around her and well-attuned to its foibles and absurdities, which she was able to express with a dry, sophisticated wit. Now imagine such a character living for two hundred years. Well, stop imagining because that's not the Jane in this novel, who sometimes comes off as a bit of a blank. She is a likable chick lit heroine with a wit adequate for that role, but she falls short of being Jane Eyre. It's a little grating how inconsistently she's written. Jane allegedly hung out with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Josephine Baker in the '20s and then was in one of the original theatrical productions of The Rocky Horror Show in the '70s, yet she's utterly clueless about baseball. She mentions how Emma was adapted into Clueless, yet she's shocked that the film adaptation of her first Jane Fairfax novel involves changing the era. She doesn't come off as overwhelmed by modern life as just incurious about the world around her, which just seemed sort of pathetic. The book does attempt some social satire, with its second-hand observations about Jewish mothers and Hollywood vanity, but the author is no Jane Austen.

I will admit, the novel was often amusing, and if I preferred my vampires and Regency authors as bland and inoffensive as possible, I might have enjoyed it more. Bottom line, while the book has some merit as “fast-food fiction,” it's not really my cup of tea.