Re Jane

March 16, 2015
Park’s debut is a cheeky, clever homage to Jane Eyre, interwoven with touching meditations on Korean-American identity. Jane Re has never felt like she fit in, and not just because she’s a half-Korean orphan in the “all-Korean, all the time” enclave of Flushing, Queens. After graduating from CUNY, she’s still stocking shelves in her uncle’s grocery store while her overachieving peers have moved on to graduate school and high-profile finance jobs. Desperate for a change of scenery, Jane takes a job as an au pair for the Mazer-Farleys, a Brooklyn couple with an adopted Chinese daughter. Jane comes to love her charge, her new neighborhood, and her new bosses. But when the friendly bond she shares with Ed Farley goes a step too far, she flees New York for Seoul, where she gets in touch with her roots and uncovers a new sense of identity. Though the Brontë references occasionally land with the subtlety of an anvil, Park’s clever one-liners make the story memorable, and her riffs on cultural identity will resonate with any reader who’s ever felt out of place. Agent: Esmond Harmsworth and Lane Zachary, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth.

March 15, 2015
A young Korean-American woman grapples with issues of identity, family, and love in Park's debut novel, a sweet and savvy bildungsroman. Jane Re is a recent college graduate whose high-finance job offer evaporated when the dot-com bubble burst. Now she's stuck restocking shelves and serving irritable customers at Food, her disapproving aunt and uncle's grocery store. It doesn't help that everyone in her Korean immigrant neighborhood knows she's an orphan, and honhyol (mixed-blood) to boot. While her friends from school are off to impressive professional jobs, Jane is stuck in unfashionable Queens, wrestling with the broken door of the walk-in freezer, the constant criticism of her appearance ("Koreanish") and behavior, and the uncomfortable rigidity of family life. When her geeky friend Eunice Oh suggests she apply for an au pair job in Brooklyn, Jane finds herself plunged into a bewilderingly different cultural context that turns out to be a brave new world. The book is, in its own way, both a historical novel and a novel of place. Park's lovingly detailed descriptions reveal Brooklyn, Queens, and Seoul as seen by an intelligent 20-something in the first years of the 21st century. A varied cast of characters-women's-studies professors, a Chinese adoptee, an Italian immigrant babysitter with a talent for home renovation-is drawn with affectionate respect. Park does a lovely job of tracing Jane's growing maturity and self-knowledge. Her experiences facing her family history and complex identity when she visits South Korea to see her dying grandfather nicely mirror those among Korean immigrants and others in the U.S. Park is a fine writer with an eye for the effects of class and ethnic identity, a sense of humor, and a compassionate view of human weakness who nevertheless doesn't make the rookie error of letting her characters off easy. An enjoyable book offering a portrait of a young woman struggling to come into her own in the increasingly complicated opening years of a new century.

June 1, 2015

Park's debut is a contemporary retelling of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre with a Korean American twist. It is the early 2000s in Flushing, Queens, where Jane Re works in her uncle's grocery store after failing to attain a high-powered finance job in the post-dot-com era. Jane, a half-American/half-Korean orphan, doesn't exactly fit in with the residents of the Korean neighborhood where she's lived all her life, and the people around her never fail to point out this fact. Downtrodden from her grocery gig and her uncle's routine emotional abuse, Jane is tempted into an au pair position taking care of English professors Beth and Ed's adopted Chinese child. Introduced to organic foods and 19th-century literature, Jane is both the focus of Beth's feminist lectures and Ed's male gaze. Just as Jane strikes up an affair with Ed, a family death takes her back to Korea, where she begins to wonder if Ed is really the one. VERDICT This brightly written and engrossing read takes Jane Eyre and turns it into a lesson about self-acceptance. It will appeal to readers who enjoy modern retellings of classic literature, as well as fans of Jean Kwok and Ha Jin.--Mara Dabrishus, Ursuline Coll. Lib., Pepper Pike, OH

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2016

Dutiful Jane Re, a half-Korean/half-American orphan living in Flushing, Queens, and working in her strict uncle's grocery store, tries to escape her lot in life by becoming the au pair for the Mazer-Farleys, English professors in Brooklyn who have adopted a Chinese girl. She soon falls in love with Mr. Ed Farley, despite the existence of Beth Mazer, his feminist wife. An emergency trip to Seoul because of a death in the family pushes her to consider her choices, especially her budding affair with her boss. The contrasts among the different environments in which Jane finds herself-her uncle's grocery store, the Mazer-Farleys's Brooklyn neighborhood, and modern-day Korea- are vivid and pronounced and reflect the different cultures that make up and sometimes cause conflict within the heroine's identity. The young woman's struggle to find the balance between what her family and tradition expect from her and what she hopes to fashion for herself will ring true for teens. The witty and charming protagonist will win over readers. Pair with Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea for a nuanced look at Jane Eyre retellings. VERDICT This fun, contemporary, and moving reimagining of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre offers an honest look at life between two cultures and the importance of living for oneself-Shelley Diaz, School Library Journal

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2015
Jane never felt she belonged. A half-white, half-Korean orphan living with her aunt and uncle in the immigrant neighborhood of Flushing, Queens, at the start of the twenty-first century, she reluctantly accepts an au pair position after another job offer disappears. In this fresh retelling of Jane Eyre, Jane finds that her new lifecaring for the adopted Chinese daughter of a feminist academic up for tenure and her high-school-English-teacher husbandopens the way for Jane to uncover her past and determine her future. While Park has adopted Bronte hallmarks such as addressing the reader directly, the story line is distinctly modern. This Jane is ever-conscious of her outsider status, her few forays into self-indulgence having met with instant uncertainty, as her stern uncle's voice rings through her head. Park has a gift for presenting scenes laden with the Korean sense of nunchi, or the ability to read a situation to determine how to act. As Jane travels to Brooklyn and Seoul and back again, she finds her voice and learns to forge her own place in the world. An excellent choice for book clubs.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)