Age Appropriate? What We Do--and Don't--Tell Kids to Read

I'm sure everyone and his mother has opinions about the age appropriateness of certain books, and that the large community of YA readers, writers, reviewers, and their mothers have more opinions than most. Until recently, I was pretty sure I didn't have opinions like that. My parents never really monitored my reading when I was growing up, though we always did talk about it, and I loved nothing more than doing just that. I read a lot, even as a kid, devouring pretty much all the fiction I could get my hands on -- most of it found while browsing my school or public library, or the local bookstore.

As a member of the Harry Potter generation -- and as someone whose love of fantasy was rekindled by those books -- I grew up at the forefront of some of the biggest debates about age suitability and parents controlling what their kids read, and all of it struck me as incredibly strange. I distinctly remember being very puzzled as to why one of my friends, to whom I was incredibly grateful for introducing me to the Chronicles of Narnia, wasn't allowed to read Harry Potter. (Him: They have witches and wizards! Me: So does C. S. Lewis. And the White Witch is scarier than Voldemort. Him: But the Chronicles of Narnia are Christian books! Me: Have you noticed they always celebrate Christmas at Hogwarts?) Aside from the fact that telling the average kid not to do something is the best way to ensure he does just that (something J. K. Rowling thoroughly understands -- look at what happens in Order of the Phoenix when Umbridge tries to ban the Quibbler), telling kids not to read things just never made sense to me.

But now that I am slightly older, with two younger cousins coming to me for reading recommendations, I'm realizing that there's another side to parental control of reading -- not just what grown-ups forbid, but what they never recommend.

Over the past week, I've read two young adult novels -- Jane Yolen's Dragon's Blood, first published in 1982, and Holly Black's White Cat, first published in 2010 -- and although they're very different novels, they got me thinking again about the question of content and age suitability.

Dragon's Blood takes place on a desert planet where one of the main businesses (and pastimes) is training dragons to fight each other. The planet's economy depends upon a system of indentured servitude, with people trying to earn enough coins to fill their bags and buy free of their debts. The story follows fifteen-year-old Jakkin as he attempts to do just this by stealing a dragon egg and raising the hatchling to become a fighter. By all rights I should recommend this book to my cousin -- what teenage boy, or girl for that matter, doesn't like reading about dragons? -- but I'm not sure I will. While male indentured servants tend to fill their bags by working in dragon hatcheries, as Jakkin does, most of the (male) characters in the novel seem to think that the only way for female indentured servants to do the same is to work at brothels -- which are so connected to these indebted women that they are known as "baggeries," where women work to fill their bags. On the one hand, it's probably realistic that a kid who works at a middle-of-nowhere dragon hatchery wouldn't have encountered or heard stories of other jobs for indentured women. And on the world that Yolen has set up, it might be that there aren't many. But I'm not exactly sure this is the kind of book I want my young male cousin to be reading.

White Cat, aside from possessing a teenaged male protagonist, is a very different story. Seventeen-year-old Cassel lives in a world remarkably like this one, except for the fact that he comes from a family of curse workers, whose (technically illegal) powers let them do everything from changing people's luck to manipulating emotions to breaking bones, all with the touch of an ungloved hand. Cassel's the only one in the family who isn't a "worker," but it doesn't keep him from getting all tied up in his elder brothers' mafia connections or having to deal with the fact that his mom's in jail for using her abilities. The result is that he feels way older than the average seventeen-year-old, and in some ways the book seems "older," too -- to the point that some reviewers have complained that it is far too violent to be a young adult read. In White Cat, people beat people up, lie and cheat and steal, break into houses, and take orders from organized crime syndicates without any of this seeming particularly out-of-the-ordinary. At moments it is unabashedly violent. And yet my gut response is that I'd be more likely to recommend it to my cousin than Dragon's Blood, and not just because it's a better novel. For some reason, I don't feel the need to shelter him from violence the way I feel like I should be directing him away from even oblique (but pervasive) references to sex slavery.

Thinking further about this comparison, it's not like White Cat contains glowing female role models. In fact, I don't think I particularly like any of the female characters, at least not yet, largely because the ones who could possibly be likable feel underdeveloped in comparison to Cassel and his brothers (though I haven't read the sequel yet, and Red Glove could very well change this). But this doesn't change my gut feeling about the difference between these two novels. Maybe it's just because I feel more of a connection with Cassel's homework headaches and coffee consumption and family drama than I do with Jakkin's hard labor and boyish crushes, whereas my younger cousin -- still in junior high -- might have the reverse experience? Or maybe it's because mainstream media is clogged with sex and violence, desensitizing me to the impact of murder and corruption even in what is, ostensibly, a book for children? Or maybe I'm just crazy, and should never be allowed to recommend books to anyone under the age of eighteen.

All I really know is this: only some kids are like me, wandering libraries and bookstores in their free time, browsing book catalogs and standing on tip-toe to check out the books on the family bookshelves. Most kids only read what people suggest they should. And this makes me wonder, is there a point where not suggesting a book is just as bad as telling a kid not to read it in the first place?

Why I Love Young Wizards

When I first started this blog almost a year ago, my goal was clear: I needed someplace to squee, rant, and flail -- albeit in a slightly more academic manner -- about the things that I loved most in life and literature. Up at the top of the flail-worthy list is, and has always been, Diane Duane's Young Wizards series. I started reading these books when I was in the sixth grade, waiting for something to fill the void between Harry Potter books, and ended up falling head over heels for characters and a story and a world that made Harry Potter look like child's play, even to an eleven-year-old.

Since then, I've been attempting (and failing) to come up with some coherent way to express my love for this series while simultaneously making every single person who read my explanation go to their local library and find a copy of So You Want to Be a Wizard. I've recommended the series to everyone I know. I've posted about it on other sites. I've even made my mother read it.

None of this has served the ultimate purpose: to create a world in which all the cool people have read these books. This post probably won't either. But in the wake of Diane Duane's release of the long-form blurb for the tenth book in the series, tentatively titled Games Wizards Play, I feel the need to talk a little more about why these books have such a special place in my heart.

1. These are books for geeks, by a geek, that understand and make no apologies for their own geekiness (while simultaneously feeling very accessible to people who wouldn't necessarily class themselves as geeks). To the teenager I was, they were valuable because they showed me that people like me -- nerdy bookworms who'd been reading chapter books since age four and owned library cards before their peers even knew where the library was -- were important, and lovable, and not alone. To this day, these books inspire me to embrace my geek, and to be proud of it, even in circles (read: academia) where this is unexpected if not exactly unacceptable. If I'd known more geeky adults growing up, I doubt I ever would have felt uncomfortable being who I was.

2. These books have wizards. AND aliens. AND alien wizards. To phrase it as one of Duane's main characters might, it's like there really are Jedi out there. I pretty much can't think of a better sort of universe to live in. (Yes, I am a geek. See point #1.)

3. These books are also very firmly grounded in what grown-ups very frequently call "the real world." The initial protagonists, Kit and Nita, are young teens in the New York suburbs who find themselves having to juggle wizardry with the rest of their lives, with varied results. This is urban fantasy at its best, integrating what we know with what we don't and paying particular attention to the seams between these pieces.

4. The register of the books can slip from comic to dramatic in a matter of instants without the shift seeming awkward or forced. Furthermore, the jokes are funny, and the climactic scenes are stomach-clenching.

5. The language is spot-on. The dialogue sounds like the kind of dialogue that people might actually speak, and Duane's descriptive prose is so stunningly beautiful that I still stand back in awe of some passages. And she switches between the sort of mundane "invisible" prose and this more heavily-wrought description so flawlessly that I'm never startled by it, and only upon looking back do I realize that the shift has happened.

6. Diane Duane remembers her childhood. She doesn't assume that kids can't do things or that their experience of life is fundamentally different from adults'. As such, she writes kids who are fully, believably, and lovably kids. She doesn't idealize childhood as a problem-free zone, and she's great at tackling the kinds of problems that kids really do have in a real and respectful manner.

7. Unlike most young adult fantasy, which seems only capable of granting power to children in the absence of their parents, the Young Wizards series shows that parents and children can work together and be open and honest and loving with each other, while still allowing children to be who they are and make their own decisions. There are no evil stepmothers or wicked stepfathers here.

8. Magic doesn't fix everything. In fact, it often seems to make things more complicated: for example, if you get into a fight with your best friend you can ignore him for a while, but if your best friend also happens to be your partner in wizardry, you'll have to work it out sooner rather than later. Wizardry never functions as a deus ex machina, and thus is never cheapened -- but there are some things that it just can't do.

9. Magic isn't easy. Harry Potter might have been my "gateway drug" into YA fantasy, but in retrospect the idea that you can just point a wand and say a word to do a spell seems so simplistic. Duane's magic is difficult, something that must be learned and for which you must pay a price, but this makes mastering it all the more worthwhile.

10. The metaphysics of the Young Wizards universe might hinge on the expected cosmic good-and-evil axis, but they do so in complex ways that are never moralizing. Duane's vision of a wizardly afterlife known as Timeheart, where "what's loved survives," is the most poignant and -- to use a word you don't hear too often -- just that I have ever encountered. If I could trade whatever metaphysical reality we live in now for any specific fictional one, it would be this one.

11. Words are magical. While a lot of fantasy authors craft systems of magic around the use of specific words, or magical languages, I haven't read one to beat Duane's -- and I've read a lot. More importantly, though, it's not just words spoken in the wizardly Speech that matter. These novels persistently value the act of talking, in any language, with other people. Sometimes it's about solving disputes, or breaking barriers, or fighting past prejudices, but sometimes it's just about getting to know amiable beings a little bit better.

12. School matters. These aren't kids who just prance around saving the world and miraculously getting A's on everything without having to study. They have to work for their grades the same way they have to work for their wizardry.

13. You don't have to be a wizard to be important. Throughout the course of the series, we meet several characters who know about magic but aren't themselves wizards, and Duane is very insistent that they don't need to be wizards in order to make a difference. Thus, there is hope for us all.

14. Minor characters are incredibly well-developed. Some of them even come back later on and stop being quite so minor. I haven't met a single person in the novels so far who I didn't feel like I knew, somehow, even after just a couple of pages.

15. Alien characters are incredibly well-developed. By this, I mean that they do seem alien, with separate cultures and worldviews and all that comes along with it, but are never quite so alien that you wouldn't consider having one as a friend.

16. Duane deals with Important Life Issues without it ever feeling like "dealing with Important Life Issues" is what these novels are about. The philosophy seems to be that life is full of these big important things, and any novel attempting to accurately portray something like life will necessarily involve these, too. As a result, the novels involve themselves in questions of bullying, sacrifice, depression, politics, death, religion, friendship, love, and beyond -- without ever feeling like they're trying to teach you something. To (mis)quote one of her characters, life doesn't have a moral, though sometimes it is one.

17. At the bottom of all of this lies a fundamental wonder at the universe -- a desire to get to know it better, to help it be the best it can, and to engage other people in doing the same. To me, this wonder is at the heart of childhood, and something that adults too easily forget. It's also at the heart of science fiction done right.

18. Last (for now) -- but not least -- these novels continue to meet me where I am in my life, and offer me something new each time. I've been reading and re-reading them now for almost half of my life, and they never fail to be exactly what I need.

Alien Appreciation: The Doctor of Doctor Who

There has been an awful lot of Austen on this blog lately, and a regrettable absence of aliens. This post is an attempt to change that.

When I started racking my brain for the last science fiction book I'd read, I realized that it was Jenna Starborn, which sort of doesn't count, since it's also Jane Eyre. But then, before I allowed myself to fall into complete and utter despair, I realized that that might have been the last truly sci-fi book that I read, but it's certainly not my most recent sci-fi media encounter. That title would belong to the absolutely marvelous British television series Doctor Who. Consider this post an appreciation of my current favorite alien, and a not-so-subtle argument about why you should go watch this show as soon as you possibly can.

A lot of people have heard of Doctor Who, but if you're not British (and I'm not), it can't possibly hold the same place in your collective national psyche. The original Doctor Who started running in the sixties, in black and white, and that run didn't end until the mid-eighties. Reruns showed throughout the time when it was off the air, keeping the show as a presence and influencing the lives of generations who might not have been sentient when the show was actually on air. Then, in 2005, the whole thing was rebooted, and the craze kicked off again.

When living in London, I heard a lot about Doctor Who. My friends obsessed over who would be cast as the new Doctor; even my teachers made references to characters from the series, or specific lines and episodes! It was so pervasively cultural that by the time I'd been living there for a couple of months, hanging out with British people and trying to understand what the heck they were saying, I understood a lot about the show without even having watched it.

And then, I watched it. And seriously, wow. Maybe it's because I ran through all of the available episodes of the rebooted series in the course of a month, but that show hit me like a sledgehammer, and a lot of that has to do with the feeling it has, the ambience it creates and how different that is from what I find in so much science fiction--and how much that has to do with the character of the Doctor.

Hard science fiction fans are probably not too satisfied with Doctor Who. The science--which involves a lot of "because we can!" time-and-space travel that isn't even always used consistently within the show's universe (although I'm always far too engrossed to realize this until much later)--isn't really the show's point. The point, as the title might suggest, would be the Doctor. (Tip: his name isn't actually "Doctor Who," and if that phrase is heard, it's usually in response to him introducing himself simply as "the Doctor," which is the only proper name we ever get for him.)

The thing about Doctor Who is that it approaches space, the future, and all of the things you would expect from a science fiction series, with a lot of faith in humanity, even if it is also capable of showing that humanity often doesn't deserve it. The Doctor himself, despite belonging to an alien race called the Time Lords, looks exactly like a human being (although when humans have questioned him about this more than once his answer has been that he doesn't look human, they look Time Lord). But it's more than that. He spends a lot of time on Earth, simply because it seems that he's taken a liking to us--when he says "I'll never stop having to save you," it's equal parts frustration and affection. He believes in the kinds of days when problems are solved without violence--when everybody lives--and he's not the sci-fi hero who goes in with guns blazing. His "weapon" of choice is a sonic screwdriver, and while its powers seems to expand with each new season, most of what it does is open doors! I wholeheartedly agree with Craig Ferguson's sentiment (delivered in song!) that the show represents "the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism," and most of that is down to the continued presence of the Doctor, doing his best to save the worlds one step at a time.

I could go on and on about the Doctor, but nothing that I say about this show will take the place of watching it. So, what are you waiting for -- go watch it! If I haven't quite convinced you, or if you're looking for a little more background before jumping in, you should check out this article, or this excellent infographic. But really, just go and watch it, so that I can dissect future episodes to an audience who knows what I'm talking about!

Alien Appreciation: The 456 of Torchwood: Children of Earth

People of more discerning taste than I possess occasionally complain about the production values and special effects budget of BBC's sci-fi shows, including Doctor Who and its spin-offs. Being one of those people who appreciates less-than-top-dollar effects in sci-fi movies and shows ranging from the original Star Wars trilogy to the best of the X-Files, I can't really understand these complaints. I do realize that the Doctor Who producers don't have all that much cash to create their effects, or consequently their aliens, but although sometimes they seem to overreach themselves and produce some truly questionable costumes or effects, occasionally, they get it right.

The 456 are an example of "getting it right" -- which, in the context of Torchwood: Children of Earth, translates as "generating maximum terror on a minimum budget." From the first episode of this miniseries, when the 456 decide to get the attention of the entire world by simultaneously speaking through all of earth's children, I was suitably freaked, but my genuine horror at this alien race was only heightened by the decision to never show a clear image of their form. They appear inside a specially-designed tank in a pillar of blinding light. The tank itself is filled with toxic gases through which alien forms can only be vaguely seen, and the cinematography makes these glimpses appear even more brief by only focusing on the 456 for brief moments, switching camera angles quickly and preventing the audience from ever getting a clear idea of what the 456 look like. The audience never even learns their true name -- they are called "the 456" after the radio frequency they first used to contact the Earth.

Another part of the terror comes from the perfectly-pitched juxtaposition between their obscured but alien appearance and their clear and familiar method of expression. For although they might seem so incredibly otherworldly, they communicate with the British government by taking over a speaker system and reproducing a normal, human voice...when they're not thrashing about looking like some indiscernible hydra and spewing a vomit-like green liquid at the inside of the tank.

Again, I don't think there's a better way to have represented these aliens -- or really any aliens that are supposed to induce this kind of fear. The fear of any alien obviously stems from the fear of the unknown, but Torchwood takes it one step further and makes the 456 not only the ultimate unknown, but the ultimate unknowable. The pervasive despair of Children of Earth is that humanity is up against a foe so strange, so different, that even all of our faith in knowledge as a form of power cannot overcome the primal dread for the murky or dark.

Of course, later on in the Torchwood miniseries, the viewers are offered a closer look at the 456 -- but the same camera techniques are used, the same spirit of juxtaposition prevails, and the same sickening feeling of fear has a tendency to worm its way through my stomach. I'd say more, but in the words of another Whoniverse regular, "Spoilers!" If you want to get a real feeling for the strangeness of the 456, watch Torchwood: Children of Earth, although I'd suggest watching Series 1 and 2 of Torchwood first, and then making sure that you watch Children of Earth with a friend, a fuzzy blanket, and an incredibly heartwarming movie cued up to counteract its gut-wrenching effects.

Jenna Starborn: or, Jane Eyre and Gen Tanks

It is a truth universally acknowledged -- and, in the land of English majors, almost universally lamented -- that any sufficiently popular work of literature will be cannibalized and reworked from as many different angles as there are genres of fiction, provided its copyright is expired. Sometimes, the result is considered groundbreaking, or at least intelligent enough to receive critical acclaim on its own (Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea comes to mind, as does Gregory Maguire's Wicked). But sometimes, the result is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or any one of the hundreds of Austen spin-offs for sale at your local bookstore, in which Elizabeth and Darcy return as private detectives, range abroad as spies, or simply engage in sexual activities the likes of which could make even Wickham blush (or perhaps just start taking notes).

I must confess, I have in fact read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. In fact, there were moments when I rather liked it, because buried beneath all that zombified gore were the original words of Austen's text which had begun to captivate me the first time I read Pride and Prejudice. I had of course re-read the novel since then, but somehow returning to find my favorite passages within a different context made them stand out even more, and if I had any residual positive energy to spare for the spin-off, it was because it reminded me how fully I was in love with the original.

This and other examples have led me to realize two things about reading adaptations, updates, or spin-offs of favorite texts: 1) They will never be as good as the original, and 2) They will nonetheless surprise you by teaching you things about the original text you never really knew. The first point seems obvious; the second requires examples, and this is where Jenna Starborn comes in.

The idea of a science-fiction re-imagining of Jane Eyre might be enough to send many of the literary sort off to premature graves, but frankly, Jane Eyre and science fiction were probably of the two most significant forces in my life when I was seventeen-turning-eighteen. I was introduced to one around the same time that I was writing my International Baccalaureate Extended Essay on the other (in case you were wondering, "Images of Conformity and Individuality in Post-War Dystopia" got full marks), before I had ever entered a university English class and therefore before I discovered that most people disagreed with my assertion that Victorians and aliens were equally deserving of literary merit. I went through my senior year of high school blissfully ignorant of the prejudices harbored in many university English and creative writing departments against those who read or wrote the dreaded "genre fiction," and I'll never stop being thankful that I did, because I have a feeling that in the long run, being that kind of person would have diminished my ability to read and enjoy Jane Eyre as surely as it would have destroyed my ability to read and enjoy Jenna Starborn.

Sharon Shinn's novel might not live up to the source of its inspiration (see Rule 1 above), but reading it was an engaging experience in reading beyond the horizons of what the university deems "literary" and frankly gave me a deeper understanding of why Jane Eyre works on me in the way that it does (see Rule 2). The plot follows closely the basic narrative path of Jane Eyre: Jenna Starborn, grown in a gen tank by a woman who wanted a child of her body but could not conceive, becomes obsolete mere months after she is born when her "Aunt" Rentley (who has not yet legally adopted her) is one of the first women to purchase an artificial womb. She gives birth to her own son, and suddenly Jenna is left as a half-citizen member of a grand household in which her basic needs are cared for but she is ignored as something between a nuisance and a mistake. As a girl of eight, Jenna is sent off-world to a charity school that focuses on teaching its pupils useful mechanical trades, where she graduates with all the knowledge necessary to fill a post as a nuclear generator technician. After a few years spent teaching theoretical physics, Jenna, who has adopted for herself the surname "Starborn" common to many unclaimed children of the gen tanks, tires of her post and seeks employment as the personal technician on the estate of wealthy landowner Everett Ravenbeck, whose mining interests on a terraformed world with a hostile atmosphere require the constant protection of a generator-powered force field.

The extent to which Shinn's re-imagining relies on what I think of as "shorthand" -- the reader's implied previous knowledge of the source text -- made me realize the necessity of those portions of Jane Eyre which, dear readers, I must confess to occasionally skipping. When I began Jane Eyre as a girl of seventeen, I knew nothing of its plot; I empathized with Jane's childish tenacity, felt the indignity of her suffering at the hands of her aunt and cousins, and waited with baited breath to see the kind of woman she would become. But after the terror and defiance of the Red Room scenes, I was left with chapter after chapter of her experiences at Lowood, which, although certainly character-forming, were nonetheless dull. Even her first weeks at Thornfield did little to alleviate the boredom, so that by Chapter 11 I, too, began to long for "incident, fire, life, feeling" -- and in subsequent re-readings, conducted primarily for pleasure, I had a tendency to skim over everything until Jane's meeting with Rochester in Chapter 12.

It wasn't until I noticed that Shinn was attempting something similar in her retelling, by condensing the content of those first chapters so that they didn't get in the way of Mr. Ravensbeck's arrival, that I realized exactly how important those "boring" first eleven chapters really are to Jane Eyre. They subtly manipulate the reader into sympathy with Jane, so that Rochester arrives on scene only when the reader is as willing as Jane to accept his appearance as a positive change. Edward Rochester may be a deeply unlikeable character in many respects, but after the eight-year-long dry spell to which Jane (and the reader) has been condemned, it's no surprise that she falls for the first thing that makes an impact in her world, and takes us down with her.

Because I know Jane Eyre, I was ready and willing to fall in love with Jenna Starborn -- but it's precisely because I know Jane Eyre that I didn't. The abridgment of Jenna's childhood hardships made her less sympathetic to me than Jane has always been, but it also made me less eager for the Rochester-analogue to come onstage. In this and many other instances, I felt like Shinn was so bent upon delivering just what her readers expected, and getting it to them before they could complain, that she inadvertently overlooked the longing that is, for me at least, the motor of Jane Eyre's plot (and Jane's character) in volumes I and II.

This isn't to say that any change to basic plotting, style, or character in a spin-off or adaptation necessarily destine it for the worst. In fact, I frequently read adaptations just for these changes or additions, so I was quite pleased with Shinn's inclusion of the character of Janet Ayerson. With Jenna taking up the job of a nuclear technician rather than a governess, Shinn still needed someone to oversee Mr. Ravensbeck's Adele-analogue bastard child, and thus Janet Ayerson appears onstage as a necessarily less feisty Jane Eyre figure who must watch the child but will never win the love of the master. Instead, Janet runs off with a wealthy and attractive friend of Ravensbeck, who woos her with promises of marriage but installs her as nothing more than his mistress and disposes of her when he becomes bored -- a shocking and unexpected reminder of the danger that Jane Eyre and Jenna Starborn both face in loving men above their station who could so easily destroy these women's characters with no fault being returned to the men for doing so.

It was at about this realization that Jenna Starborn began to disappoint -- because, though Jane of course was trapped within the nineteenth century, Jenna maneuvers in a world of the future where one might be tempted to expect something closer to gender and class equality. Unfortunately, this isn't a possibility Shinn seems prepared to provide for; though she does concoct a reasonable backstory regarding the exploration and settlement of space by wealthy families who instigated an interplanetary class system as a means of retaining their power, doing so seems at times like an easy way out of dealing with what I consider some of the really interesting questions. For example, does the Jane Eyre plot, so concerned with the value of sexual virtue (for women, at least) and embroiled in concerns of marriage still play out the same in a future more sexually promiscuous and less traditionally bounded than the present? How would a clever author have to rearrange details of plot and character to conceive of a Bertha-analogue character who provided a significant plot impediment without the institution of marriage? At the very least, I expected Jenna and Ravensbeck to participate in a more explicitly sexual relationship than Jane and Rochester (by which I mean not that I expected them to jump each other after a relatively short acquaintance, but that I expected them to at least allow themselves to think about it, something the narrative conventions of the Victorian novel more or less forbade Charlotte Bronte to do). However, in this, as in my desire to see a retelling that managed to find a suitable replacement for the marriage plot, I was disappointed; the courtship aspect of Shinn's novel is nearly as Victorian in its sensibilities as the original. The wedding vows might require the characters to swear that neither of them are aliens whose interbreeding with humans has been forbidden, but beyond that, it's a ceremony like any other.

I could go into even more depth about the multiple minute differences of plot, style, and character between Jenna Starborn and Jane Eyre, but I think I've gone far enough now to prove my Rule 2 of retellings, and anything else I have to say will probably consist primarily of whining that should really have been silenced by Rule 1. Jenna Starborn isn't Jane Eyre, but it does manage to ask some interesting questions, whether intended by the author or not, and makes me see Jane Eyre in a newer, clearer light -- and is no less worth reading for the former than the latter.