enna Starborn wasn't exactly born. Her DNA was chosen, mixed and incubated in an institutional tank on Baldus. Her existence was contracted for by a fabulously rich but emotionally beggared society type who had no children but wanted a companion and an heir. But Jenna is soon displaced. After a few years in her adopted home, medical advances make it possible for Jenna's rich benefactor to conceive and produce an heir of her own body.
Jenna is no longer needed or wanted and, never having been officially adopted or recognized as a citizen (in a confederacy of planets where citizenship is everything), Jenna is relegated to legal limbo as a half-cit. No real rights. Not allowed to own property. Few options. Jenna is now an inconvenience, an embarrassment. Unwanted. Maltreated.
When her poor health finally lands her in the hospital, the authorities grant Jenna a kind of reprieve, the chance to go to a distant orphanage for half-cits where she can acquire skills that could earn her a living. There, she spends the remainder of her childhood eagerly learning, her sharp mind
finding sustenance at last. Her heart, though, still starves. There is a small bit of friendship among the students, but there is no family. When she finally graduates, Jenna is a certified nuclear technician. Her mind is keen and her hands quick. But her heart is ever cautious, ever practical.
Alone and near-penniless, Jenna is nevertheless eager to see distant worlds, and lands a job on a distant planet, working for a fabulously wealthy and enigmatic citizen of the highest rank. His strange way of treating her as an equal intrigues her, and the barriers around her sensible heart begin to give way. But just when it seems that all her sorrows are transforming into joys, desperate secrets from her employer's past banish her to the outer rim of civilization.
An ambitious and sincere homage
Author Sharon Shinn takes a sincere stab at alchemizing science fiction from the popular, gloomy, gothic novels of the 1830s. Jenna Starborn loyally, but not slavishly, follows the plot and character outlines of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. It is a loyal enough retelling so
that even if the reader has not read the jacket copy that declares this novel to be an adaptation of the classic tale, the similarities will be salient.
Jenna (Jane) and Mr. Ravenbeck (Mr. Rochester) are almost well-written enough to pull off this literary sleight of hand, and there are moments in Shinn's novel that possess kernels of real poignancy. Most of the other characters are pale shades, however, and reverberate more strongly as plot devices than creatures of their own desires.
The construction of the narrative is hampered by Shinn's use of a literary device to assist Jenna in her first-person accounts. Shinn equips Jenna with a voice diary of limitless memory, and this device pops up awkwardly, irregularly and almost self-consciously through the chapters. The narrative's construction might have also been helped if Shinn hadn't been so loyal to the original, as the pacing is always a little off-stride.
Shinn should be lauded for worthy inspiration, though, even if that inspiration never fully flowered into its promise. Within the sci-fi setting, the class system of 19th-century England becomes a rigid,
futuristic caste society. Cyborgs and artificially created human beings substitute for serfs and untouchables. Through these parameters, the novel asks compelling questions about what the nature of humanness is, and how society should weigh the concepts of equality and aristocracy and religion.
