I heard about this book on NPR and just wanted to read it....and I really enjoyed it!
Park's debut is a contemporary retelling of Charlotte Brontë'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.
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