My Plain Jane

I so want to give this a higher rating than the 3.5 I've settled on. I pre-ordered My Plain Jane because I enjoyed [b:My Lady Jane 22840421 My Lady Jane (The Lady Janies, #1) Cynthia Hand https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1444923765s/22840421.jpg 42397220] so much, and I just read [b:Jane Eyre 10210 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327867269s/10210.jpg 2977639] for the first time earlier this year, and I also really liked that. And ... there is a lot that I liked here: Helen Burns is dead but still awesome as a ghost, Mr. Brocklehurst gets what's coming to him, Bertha Rochester is pretty cool when she's finally let out of that stinkin' attic, pretty much everything about Charlotte Brontë (this book is just as much about Charlotte as it is about Jane, and Charlotte is a wonderful character). Just as in My Lady Jane, there's still royal intrigue, and ridiculous mishaps, and evil people who want to steal the throne using nefarious means.And I love a good throwback reference to other works of art, but I think My Plain Jane got a little carried away with it; I started highlighting when I noticed them, because at first I thought it was super fun to try to catch them (gotta catch ‘em all?!?). Obviously, the source material is followed pretty closely, and because one of the POV characters is trying to recruit Jane into the Society of the Relocation of Wayward Spirits, of course there's some Ghostbusters references. There's also a cute reference to My Lady Jane near the end. But there's also references to Oliver Twist, the musical Hamilton, Harry Potter, the Copa Cabana, [b:an Al Franken book 23577 Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right Al Franken https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1438778188s/23577.jpg 344426], Shrek, and the TV show Pushing Daisies, and those are just the ones I noticed and thought to highlight. It got to be a little much.I did really enjoy the story, and probably will still end up getting the third book in the series when it comes out, because these books are a lot of fun and perfect escapism, but I think overall My Lady Jane was better.(Having not been a die-hard Jane Eyre fan for years or an English major, I wouldn't have known some of the things that other reviewers have complained about, re: comparisons to Jane Austen. If you don't already know those things, I don't think they affect the enjoyment of the story or its characters at all.)