Snow Falling by Jane Gloriana Villanueva

I don’t think knowing the story was the weakness in the book, though… it does seem weird that Jane would literally use her life as the plot, rather than taking inspiration. The importance is in the journey and the execution of that journey. Why is there a book?” She does have a point, but she’s also not a romance reader.

In discussing this book with a fellow Jane fan, she wrinkled her nose a bit and went, “We already know what this story is, since we watched the Jane-World version in the show. The writing isn’t strong enough to make the characters robust enough to hold up this plot. So while a television show or a telenovella can manage with an overload of plot, this book can’t. What’s the real motivation behind the international crime lord? (Well, it’s an international crime lord, so…crime?) What makes Rake interested in Josephine? No idea. And nothing really has any space to breathe. There are a lot of subplots that are excised, but there’s still so much happening: an international crime lord, a not-very-ex wife, family issues, a long lost father, a baby out of wedlock, and yes, a love triangle. And there’s 44 episodes of the show, and a LOT of plot (there’s so much plot) which is crammed into 238 pages. Part of what makes this book not work is that it follows the plot of the show, which we know. (I’m not really a fan of the unexpected pregnancy happening because of cheating, to be honest.) Rake of course is smitten with Josephine, Josephine loves Martin, Martin is very perplexed by all of this… it’s messy. That’s not something that really works in the early days of the 1900s, so instead, Josephine gets drunk and sleeps with Rake, and then gets pregnant. Of course, the premise of Jane the Virgin is that she’s a pregnant due to an accidental artificial insemination. That includes the love triangle between Jane, Michael, and Rafael (Josephine, Martin, and Rake). What this means is that the book took the first two seasons of the show and rewrote it into a historical. In Jane World, she wrote her first novel based on the love story between herself and her husband, Michael, but set it in 1900s Miami. There’s the Real World layer, the Jane World layer (what’s happened in the show), and the Book World layer. There’s a lot of meta involved, and there’s a few layers we have to work through. But there’s a fundamental truth that what works as a storytelling technique in one medium doesn’t always work in another. It’s broken the fourth wall and appeared in our hands. This is supposed to be Jane’s first novel, which is about to be published in the timeline of the show. Some of those trials and tribulations are just too real. Around here, we adore Jane the Virgin, and I’ve been loving the storyline of Jane becoming a romance author.

Snow Falling by Jane Gloriana Villanueva