Jane Eyre Meets the 21st Century This retelling of the classic Charlotte Brontë Gothic novel, Jane Eyer, includes everything you loved about the original, updated for the 21st Century. Closely following the original's plot lines and character development, Jane starts with ten year old Jane St. John, this one living in a brownstone in Brooklyn, falling afoul of her stepmother and abusive cousins, and getting shipped off to Lowood, a school for wayward girls. More like a prison than a boarding school, Lowood is where the abandoned, abused, and poor girls of New York State are left in the care of an ambitious psychiatrist who pronounces them all mentally ill and pursues a course of institutional abuse as a self-styled cure. Despite humiliations and deprivations, Jane makes friends with another resident girl, and the two of them provide emotional support through harrowing run-ins with the headmaster, lack of food and warm clothes, and a deadly outbreak of Legionnaire's disease. Though many girls do not survive Lowood, our Jane does and eight years on is a teacher at the same school, yearning to escape dreary upstate New York and start her "real life." She applies for—and gets—a summer job as nanny for a rich family in St. Barthes. Thinking she's finally earned some good luck, Jane flies to the island paradise and takes up her new duties in a Gothic mansion built by Corsaires for a notorious island family. Just like in Jane Eyre, there's a prickly housekeeper, an abrasive employer, and strange noises and visitations during the night that keep the story moving along at a clip. Madwoman in the attic? This one's on the roof. There's also a romance in there someplace, but not the Cinderella variety. Jane doubts her own emotional capacity to love or trust anyone and suspects her romantic partner of lies and betrayal. Suspicions that turn out to be true. Jane explores the inner turmoil of an independent woman who is often insecure and angry with the world and her place in it. Jane isn't a Betty-Sue. But somehow, through it all, she learns to confront her demons, both those in the old house and those she's carried along from her past, and finds a way to live with herself. More than a modern Gothic romance, Jane is the coming-of-age story of a 21st century feminist and an engrossing read for anyone that likes Gothic romances and feminist ideas.