Strict Confidence by Skye Warren Series: Rochester Trilogy #2
Published by Skye Warren on 15th June 2021
Pages: 292
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Forbidden. Commanding. Mysterious.
Beau Rochester has an entire house full of secrets. And those secrets are putting Jane Mendoza in danger.
She fell in love with the one man she can't have. She should leave Maine to protect her heart, but the thread refuses to be severed. The brooding Mr. Rochester and his grieving niece are more than her job. They're her new family.
She races against time to find answers and protect the people she loves. The cliffside grows dark with the misdeeds of the past. Her heart and her sanity fight a battle, but they are both at risk.
Will Mr. Rochester learn to trust Jane? And will that trust destroy her?
As far as retellings go, Skye Warren’s self-styled ‘Jane Eyre’ in Jane Mendoza and Beau Rochester kind of hits the mark. Characterisation, atmospheric writing, the slow, drag of suspense? The dark, brooding Byronic (and very volatile, nearly unreadable) hero stalking around the pages? All ticks.
But there are also pitfalls in doing such a retelling while keeping up a contemporary twist to the story, in that some classics don’t necessarily age well, particularly in the kind of sensibilities the protagonists (and by extension, the original authors) reflect—of their own time and culture and moral leanings. Here, Jane Eyre’s upright, Christian leanings seem to have translated into a young, naive girl in Jane Mendoza who barely keeps her head above water, is trodden over and over, and isn’t strong enough to simply walk away or stand up for herself in the bald-faced cruelty of the obstinate Beau Rochester.
In contrast, Beau simply ended up looking like a self-castigating idiot, content to wallow in his repetitive (and frankly, annoying) arm-chair self-pity without actively wanting to prove himself worthy of a future with Jane by clinging to a past he wants so badly to leave behind.
Going through the books was at first, a way of watching out for character growth and redemption before it became an exercise in reining in my frustration when Jane and Beau simply padded around each other, their dance painfully punctuated by the Beau’s appalling mistreatment of her and broken in numerous places by the former’s inability to cast off that inherent weakness when it comes to Beau.
The only pull between them is Paige Rochester, the girl who may or may not be the product of Beau’s night of adultery with a former lover and the woven suspense around mysterious events happening around the reclusive property that they live in.
I adore Warren’s compelling writing; I really do, which is why the Rochester series had me hesitant the more and more I went into it. My inability to find anything likeable about the characters probably has a lot to do with it, I suspect, but also the excruciating interplay of repetition between Jane and Beau–the glaring inequality between them that never really lessened–without it going anywhere must have contributed to it.
