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P.'s Reviews > Jane
Jane
by
by
** spoiler alert **
There are 2 main reasons why this retelling didn't work as well as I'd hoped it would (and they are, of course, connected):
1. The story doesn't really work except as a vehicle for the Jane Eyre structure. As in: the plot makes sense in a world with Jane Eyre, but in a Jane Eyre-less world, it is flimsy.
2. The actual telling of the story is done in first person, so it's like Jane is telling someone about what happened to her, which ends up leaving the narrative as a sketch. Even though it is 375 pages long. Like a friend was recounting a vacation that you know was exciting, but hearing about it becomes boring because it goes like this: "we went to the gardens and they were so pretty! And then we ate at this restaurant and it was delicious. I had a salad. The next day we ..."
What I mean is that there's a certain inevitability to the plot, because the plot was already written by Charlotte Bronte, and I could feel Linder taking the elements of the plot and slotting her updates in, but not refreshing the plot very much. So that the inevitability became staleness.
3. This relates to #1... the whole St. John thing is weirdly distanced from the real world. I feel like Jane Eyre could refuse St. John because living was harder back then, in general. But Jane Moore refuses River St. John and her life helping the homeless and caring about Haiti without much back-and-forth. Sure, she mentions that in her life with Nico they are going to put on benefits for Haiti, but she doesn't seem very affected by the people she's met. I wanted more of that experience, more growth from Jane. And she says that her job as a grant writer became boring after a couple weeks. Grant-writing is HARD! A 19 year old who had to drop out of college would have a steeper learning curve, methinks.
On the same un-researched tip, there's supposed to be a documentary about Nico and his band, and it is described as though it were an installment of VH1's Behind the Music. Documentaries of bands, unlike historical documentaires, actually are composed of things filmed as events are happening, (see: Some Kind of Monster) and thus would not be a series of boring talking heads.
IN SHORT, although I was frustrated by this retelling, I still wanted to finish it... but I mostly ended up wanting to re-read Jane Eyre.
1. The story doesn't really work except as a vehicle for the Jane Eyre structure. As in: the plot makes sense in a world with Jane Eyre, but in a Jane Eyre-less world, it is flimsy.
2. The actual telling of the story is done in first person, so it's like Jane is telling someone about what happened to her, which ends up leaving the narrative as a sketch. Even though it is 375 pages long. Like a friend was recounting a vacation that you know was exciting, but hearing about it becomes boring because it goes like this: "we went to the gardens and they were so pretty! And then we ate at this restaurant and it was delicious. I had a salad. The next day we ..."
What I mean is that there's a certain inevitability to the plot, because the plot was already written by Charlotte Bronte, and I could feel Linder taking the elements of the plot and slotting her updates in, but not refreshing the plot very much. So that the inevitability became staleness.
3. This relates to #1... the whole St. John thing is weirdly distanced from the real world. I feel like Jane Eyre could refuse St. John because living was harder back then, in general. But Jane Moore refuses River St. John and her life helping the homeless and caring about Haiti without much back-and-forth. Sure, she mentions that in her life with Nico they are going to put on benefits for Haiti, but she doesn't seem very affected by the people she's met. I wanted more of that experience, more growth from Jane. And she says that her job as a grant writer became boring after a couple weeks. Grant-writing is HARD! A 19 year old who had to drop out of college would have a steeper learning curve, methinks.
On the same un-researched tip, there's supposed to be a documentary about Nico and his band, and it is described as though it were an installment of VH1's Behind the Music. Documentaries of bands, unlike historical documentaires, actually are composed of things filmed as events are happening, (see: Some Kind of Monster) and thus would not be a series of boring talking heads.
IN SHORT, although I was frustrated by this retelling, I still wanted to finish it... but I mostly ended up wanting to re-read Jane Eyre.
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