Re Jane

I'm always pretty lame when it comes to books that parallel/modernize other and older books/plays, so any Jane Eyre references in this excellent book blew right by me. But it's a great story standing on its own, of making a place where there isn't one set for you. Jane is half American, half Korean, and lives with her uncle and aunt in Flushing, Queens, where they runs a produce store and pressure Jane to achieve every goal that such elders have for their progeny - Ivy league, lawyer or doctor, marriage to someone with "prospects". Jane heads in different directions - to an au pair job in Brooklyn, to Korea, and back to the US.

Her journey is so confusing, so contradictory, so difficult - that although her background may be unusual to show more the reader, her reactions and decisions are not. I loved being introduced to two Korean expressions - tap-tap-hae and nunchi - that I am considering adding them to my vocabulary as a tribute to Patricia Park and her brilliant debut novel. show less

Going in, I knew this was about a Korean-American girl in Flushing, but I didn't realize until the familiar names started to mount up that this story is heavily Jane Eyre-influenced. I say influenced and not a retelling, because many names and some of the major story points transfer, but most of Re Jane is a Korean-American coming-of-age story.

Jane Re is half-Korean, half- American, but growing up with her Korean aunt, uncle and cousins in Flushing. I loved the setting, with so many familiar details. Windows on the World really was the fancy place to take visiting relatives. Later on, "Dan’s ESL Coffeehouse" posts jobs for traveling ESL teachers, and ESL students choose their names from Friends. (I taught abroad slightly after Jane show more did, with Carries and Mirandas in with the Monicas and Rachels.)

In the original, Mr Rochester isn't really a great boyfriend, I mean, locking his wife away and then the attempted bigamy should pretty much disqualify him from heartthrob status, right? Here, Ed here is exactly the kind of guy you'd imagine flirting with the babysitter behind his wife's back. Instead of telling his wife that he doesn't care about organic food, he and Jane sneak his daughter Devon bright-colored ices and McDonalds dinners whenever Beth's not around. This comes off much less forbidden-romance and more cringe.

I guess I didn't see Beth as deserving of any of the awful things that happened to her. Ed's wife, Dr Beth Mazer, is a women's studies' prof at Mason College, and the idea of feminist academic who drinks wheatgrass juice and doesn't shave felt like an underdeveloped stereotype. In some ways, I think Beth's sloppy style is meant to set up a contrast to Jane's hyperpolished Korean coworkers, but a woman who dares to look her age just doesn't feel villainous to me.

It's really when Jane goes to Korea that the story gets moving -- the Rochester romance is so cringy that I wanted her to marry perfectly-fine Changhoon just to stay away from him. (I knew he was the underwhelming St. John match, but still.) In Korea, the story of her family, and then some of the disparate pieces of her identity start to come together. This is really the strongest and most engaging part of the novel. I also enjoyed how we saw characters grow and develop over time, not just Jane. Little Devon grows up, uncle Sang changes too, and Jane's Brooklyn friend Nina finds her own path, with connections to the old neighborhood.

Engaging coming-of-age and immigration story, with great scenes of older Brooklyn and Queens, but the central romance falls flat. show less

Re Jane started off as a really fun read, a retelling of Jane Eyre that turned the story on its head and shook it up and down. Think a modern, Korean-America Jane who toils in her uncle’s corner store in Queens, New York (imaginatively titled ‘Food’). A Jane that didn’t get the career she went to college with due to the economic downturn, so decided to take an au pair job just to get out of Queens. A Jane that flies across the world on a whim, telling no one and reinventing herself – hang on, that sounds completely different!

Well it does because it is. While some of the similarities in Patricia Park’s retelling are obvious are soon as they are revealed, there are also big changes to the narrative. If you have a slavish show more devotion to original plot, there are some aspects of Re Jane that you really won’t like (like K-dramas, Beth as Bertha and the way Jane strings along some people). Hang on, did I just make a statement that Jane wasn’t a perfect golden heroine? Yes, I did. Jane Re is selfish and whinging at times. She’s after what’s best for her, except quite often she doesn’t know what it is herself. She abandons Devon, who she is the au pair for after sleeping with her father and flies to Korea, telling nobody. Oh, and this all happens on the night of 10th September 2001. So nobody – not her uncle, not the Farleys (Beth and Ed) know whether she’s dead or alive. But Jane doesn’t stop there. In Korea, she gets engaged, but then decides that’s not really what she wants either. I get that Jane is mixed up, being an orphan with a doubt over her parentage, bummed over her inability to get a job in her chosen field and young and foolish, but- she is still really, really selfish and unthinking. So while I started out loving Jane, in the end I wasn’t too fussed what happened. She seemed to take everything in her stride, then expect more without giving anything.

And our modern Mr Rochester? Well, Ed Farley was a limp fish for me. He’s not particularly stand-out awesome, nor brooding and moody. He’s just an average guy who is happy to go with the flow, cheat on his hyper-achieving wife and makes sandwiches. He was kind of bland. While I understand that in no way should Jane’s future depend on Ed in this day and age, he’s not a hero I wanted her Jane. They just seemed so…unsuited (even though Ed could be just as selfish as Jane). I much preferred Jane’s suitor in Korea, who was sweet, devoted and caring. I felt bad for him when things turned pear shaped! For me, the other star was Devon. The modern Adele, she’s smart and sassy and not afraid to try to bend the rules. I felt both Jane and Ed gave her short shift in the later part of the novel – I would have loved to see more of her.

Despite my character gripes, I did enjoy the story of Re Jane, trying to match the plot movements to that of the original story and marvelling at how well Patricia Park changed things for the modern era. Kudos also goes to Diana Bang, who was the perfect voice for Jane and did a great Korean accent. I loved Jane’s explanation of nunchi (trying to fix a particularly awkward situation smoothly – something that happens a lot in the story) and tap tap hae (that feeling that everything is closing around you in a social situation) and the section of the book set in Korea. It’s a good story, just don’t expect Jane herself to be redeemed.

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I was a white American English teacher in Korea, so the portrait of Seoul that Patricia Park draws made me nostalgic. This is a rich, charming literary pastiche that looks at Jane Eyre as well as Korean family narratives (and American immigrant narratives) with a smart, talented eye for avoiding cliche and drawing out why certain things are familiar in these types of narratives. It also handles 9/11 better than most books set around that time, so it's a rarity for that reason alone. Recomended.

Kind of a re-telling of Jane Eyre and also not. Jane Re is half Korean, half-American and has been brought up in flushing by her Korean uncle Sang and his wife after her mother dies when she was a baby. Jane has been led to believe that her father abandoned her mother and has felt shame, a constant sense of not being truly Korean and a sense of obligation to Sang for saving her from an orphanage. The story begins when Jane finishes college and, after a job in finance falls through, goes to work as an au pair for the Farleys, mainly to escape from Sang, with whom she has a difficult relationship.

The relationship between Jane and Sang was, I thought, the best thing about this book. It was so very realistically portrayed in all its faults show more and quirks and Jane is constantly re-evaluating it. Beth, the mother of the child Jane baby-sits, was another excellent character; initially an object of ridicule for Jane, her true value is appreciated at the end. In the middle of the book Jane moves to Seoul to live with her extended family and there are many thought-provoking stories about culture and where you truly belong. Jane learns that there are different kinds of Koreans and different versions of the very language.

The ending was a little disappointing, but really made sense in the context of the story as it had unfolded. I really can't recommend this book highly enough. show less

I complained on Goodreads and Litsy about the way this book is marketed as a Jane Eyre retelling. Which makes a reader come into it with certain expectations, especially a ‘what would Jane do?’ kind of perspective. Perhaps it’s better to say that it’s loosely inspired by Jane Eyre, that this half-Korean young woman, a recent college grad, trying to find her own way in the world and out from under the thumb of her uncle, who has raised her, who owns a small supermarket. She takes on a job as an au pair for an adopted Chinese girl and falls for her boss. No one dies in this book but Jane eventually flees the US and returns to Seoul and that is when the book really opens up for me. This perspective of seeing Korea through the eyes show more of a returning overseas Korean. But that may just be me, as I tend to be interested in the narrative of returning diaspora. show less

If you know Jane Eyre well, it's fun to read the book and pick out all the parallels. In the end, though, it felt like the references were the main point of the novel; I wasn't sure exactly what else Park was trying to say with her book.