Jane Eyre is one of my favorite classic books, so when I heard that Skye had series that was going to retell the story with her spin on it, I was all like sign me right the fuck up, please and thank you. And so, I got Private Property. And I was happy. Right until I hit the fucking end, and Skye was mean to me. I did, and this is the honest truth, curse her when I was done reading, because I don’t know how I’m going to last until book 2 comes out in a couple of months.
We have Jane, who has just flown from Texas to Maine so she can be the nanny to a young girl named Paige. Paige’s parents have just died, and she’s now living with her uncle Beau. She needs a nanny, and Jane needs a job. She’s just out of the foster system and she wants to go to college. The only way she can do that is to earn the money, so the nanny job it is. She signed a year long contract, and she won’t get the majority of her money until her contract is over.
She arrives in the middle of a huge storm and her employer is out in the storm because he rescued a kitten. He shoves the kitten into her hands and tells her to keep it alive and to consider it her job interview. It’s the next morning when she meets her young charge, and it’s not all that great. Paige and Beau butt heads like mad, and Paige is still hurting like hell. But Jane has some tricks that she can use to make a connection to Paige.
I really like Jane. She’s determined AF. She knows what the odds are against her as a former foster child and she’s going to do everything that she can to beat those odds. That means that she HAS to go to college. She HAS to have that degree so that she can get a good job. She worked really hard in high school to get good grades so that she could be accepted to college, so now all she has to do is to get the money. Jane is also really caring. You can see that with how good she is with Paige. It’s obvious that Paige is more than just a job to Jane, she’s someone really important. I like that Jane isn’t afraid to stand up to Beau, which I think that Beau needs more of.
Beau has secrets. Lots and lots and lots of secrets, and I can’t wait to find out more about all of them. We do get to see in his head some, but he’s fairly shut off, even in his own head, which is both interesting and compelling. It makes me really want to find out everything about him.
This isn’t an exact word for word retelling of Jane Eyre, but it does follow the story well enough for anyone who is familiar with it to see it. Skye has put in enough changes in it, other than modernising it, that you don’t know precisely what is going to happen, if that makes any sense. It does to me, anyway.
I can’t wait for the next book to come out. It’s too long from now.
In Between the Pages 