A fun read, sometimes overly overwrought, but exciting at the end. Charlotte gets to reconcile nicely with her real professor in Brussels and experience reciprocal love. I think her real-life husband appears briefly as an annoying guy. The author's note at the end says who is historically real and who is make believe.
The only book I've read by Charlotte Brontë is Jane Eyre. It seems to me that the relationship there that is most like the relationship between Charlotte and John Slade is the one between St. John Rivers and the woman he loves but will never marry. Charlotte's decision to not marry John Slade is perhaps very modern and feminist, but also, sadly, quite wise. Like St. John, she realizes that the lives they want are just too different. The quote from The Rainmaker by Lizzie that she can be Melisande for a night, but Lizzie for her whole life seems apt. A nice touch is Charlotte saying "Reader, I let him go." It's reminiscent of Jane Eyre saying, "Reader, I married him." (The exhibit I saw at the British Library with the original manuscript was opened to this page.) ( )

I have a weakness for Stephanie Barron's mystery series starring Jane Austen, so I was fairly excited to see a Charlotte Bronte spin-off. However, Laura Joh Rowland should have stuck with Japan. It is possible that she's too Charlotte Bronte in this one, as she captures all the things I find irritating in Bronte writing: too obvious intimations of dire happenings, stiff writing and a tendency toward misery, but I would have expected Emily Bronte rather than Charlotte. It's definitely more Wuthering Heights than Jane Eyre. I fault LJR, though, for the horrible pacing and the less-than-engaging main character. It was boring and eventually irritating, so I stopped reading it. The fact that it was a mystery and I didn't care what happened should tell you something right there. ( )

Where to begin? This is one of the best bad books I've listen to since The Wild Baron by Catherine Coulter. If the heroine were not Charlotte Bronte, it would have been a simple overly-melodramic adventure/romance. But adding to escapist's ultimate cou de gras is Ms. Bronte leaving the vicarage to become a victorian dectective being plunged into a nefarious kidnapping of the Queen's children and falling from virtue at the hands of a dreamboat fighting the opium wars. Ugh from me, but romance lovers will find this a treasure. I only finished it to see how the author finished it. ( )

Since I know that in reality Charlotte Bronte lived a somewhat sad life and died young, it was nice to fantasize through this novel about one of my favorite authors having a few adventures of her own. Charlotte's adventures are somewhat contrived - she witnesses a murder on the streets of London and gets pulled into the case, which ends up involving England's royal family. Despite the far-fetched plot, it was fun to imagine Charlotte solving mysteries and finding love with a mysterious gentleman. ( )

Ludicrously awful...one of the worst things I've read. I knew before picking it up that it might be disastrous, but I also thought it had the potential to be good in a madcap, Eyre Affair kind of way. PROTIP: if you want use Charlotte Brontë as the first-person narrator of your book, it's not enough to address your audience as "reader" several times--try working on characterization and writing style, too! ( )