Jenna Starborn by Sharon Shinn

Jenna Starborn is not precisely human, as most normal people would define the term. She doesn't have any cyborg parts and isn't linked up to a machine, but she was made, assembled from her constituent parts to fill the order of a woman who wanted a child, a daughter, and was willing to pay for her because her body couldn't produce one on its own.

But soon after Jenna is decanted, artificial wombs become available, and the woman who so wanted her, has a child of her own, a son, and now Jenna is no longer wanted. She grows up an orphan in her "aunt"'s home, mistreated by her son, "Jerret", and starved and neglected. When Jerret throttles her one day and Jenna declines to lie about how she got the bruises, she is sent to her room for five days, and essentially forgotten about. With water to drink but no food to eat, in five days she is near death, and is taken to the hospital to be treated.

But Jenna is done with lying, and when her "aunt" tries to lie to the doctors and say Jenna is well looked after, Jenna tells them the truth, prostrating her aunt Rentley. She is taken from her aunt's custody and sent to a technical school on the planet of Lora, where she learns to be a power core technician. There, she befriends a girl named Harriet, who dies in an accident, and as Jenna is her closest friend, the recorder called a Reeder is given to Jenna instead, who uses it as her diary.

After she graduates, Jenna becomes a teacher at the school, and when that palls for her, she takes a job on a distant world, barely able to be terraformed, taking care of the nuclear generators of an estate owned by a man named Everett Ravenbeck. When he finally meets her, he is intrigued by her, and pays an unusual amount of attention to her, which alarms her a bit but also thrills her much more.

But secrets abound on the Ravenbeck estate. How is Everett Ravenbeck's ward Amaletta related to him, and who is the prisoner in the small house who Jenna hears crying and being hurt by his or her keeper, Gilda Parenon? And how will Jenna deal with her feelings for her employer when he lies to her about the only thing that matters to her? Will everything ever be the same between them again?

As you might have guessed by now, Jenna Starborn is Jane Eyre, rewritten for the Space Age. Victorian manners are explained away as the customs of planetary elites. Jenna, as an unadopted genetic experiment, and with no money, is only a half-citizen, or a half-cit. There are also five classes of citizen, sort of like the old classes of tickets at Disneyland (with an E-ticket, or a class 1 citizenship, being the highest). These show where your citizenship is given, with a 4 or 5 being on their home planets only, and a class 1 being everywhere.

Because she is a half-cit, and poor, it's like being a mere step up from being a slave, and she's only noticed by the authorities because of her aunt nearly starving her to death through neglectfulness. But from this low point, Jenna will rise, and rise she does, even when her marriage to Everett goes through because he is already married.

Now, I have something to confess. I have never read Jane Eyre, but even so, I felt I knew this story as I was reading it, and while I find Victorian authors generally dull in writing style, this wasn't so bad, if a little draggy. For those who have enjoyed Jane Eyre, but wished the story was updated a bit, this is definitely the book for you. And even for those who haven't read it before, like me, this book will allow you to see and enjoy the story in a new way.