You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
katbancroft 's review for:
Mr. Rochester
by Sarah Shoemaker
I’d give this 3.5 stars if Goodreads allowed half stars. I loved the concept of this book and genuinely enjoyed parts of it, but its execution wasn’t perfect.
The opening, in particular, was fairly slow. While I appreciated all the historical and creative detail that Sarah Shoemaker put into building an account of Mr. Rochester’s early life, I think Shoemaker could have accomplished a lot of the same ends — illustrating the experiences that made Rochester crave real relationships and fear losing the people he loves — in fewer pages.
The story definitely picked up when Rochester got to Jamaica, and it was tragically fascinating to read about how everything so quickly fell apart with Bertha. The betrayal and anger Rochester felt at realizing his father essentially traded him away in a business deal was raw and heart-wrenching.
I was glad that Shoemaker didn’t spend too much time on Rochester’s years of wandering and indulgence in Europe, but when the actual “Jane Eyre” story started — two thirds of the way into the book — I felt a little cheated. Certainly I wasn’t expecting Shoemaker to copy and paste Charlotte Brontë’s work, but I was hoping she’d do more than skim over events with paragraphs of summary. This version of Rochester lacked much of the passion and intensity that enthralled me while reading “Jane Eyre”; I picked up this book largely because I wanted to experience those vivid emotions through Rochester’s eyes, but there were only faint echoes of it.
I liked how Shoemaker framed Rochester’s fake courtship of Miss Ingram as his misguided attempt to show Jane how much better she is (though I also wonder if it’s right to justify every mistake of a deeply flawed character). And the subplot not only fit neatly into the original sequence of events, but seemed like something that could have really happened in “Jane Eyre.” This was a great book in a lot of ways; I just wanted a tighter story and a deeper exploration of Jane and Rochester’s relationship.
The opening, in particular, was fairly slow. While I appreciated all the historical and creative detail that Sarah Shoemaker put into building an account of Mr. Rochester’s early life, I think Shoemaker could have accomplished a lot of the same ends — illustrating the experiences that made Rochester crave real relationships and fear losing the people he loves — in fewer pages.
The story definitely picked up when Rochester got to Jamaica, and it was tragically fascinating to read about how everything so quickly fell apart with Bertha. The betrayal and anger Rochester felt at realizing his father essentially traded him away in a business deal was raw and heart-wrenching.
I was glad that Shoemaker didn’t spend too much time on Rochester’s years of wandering and indulgence in Europe, but when the actual “Jane Eyre” story started — two thirds of the way into the book — I felt a little cheated. Certainly I wasn’t expecting Shoemaker to copy and paste Charlotte Brontë’s work, but I was hoping she’d do more than skim over events with paragraphs of summary. This version of Rochester lacked much of the passion and intensity that enthralled me while reading “Jane Eyre”; I picked up this book largely because I wanted to experience those vivid emotions through Rochester’s eyes, but there were only faint echoes of it.
I liked how Shoemaker framed Rochester’s fake courtship of Miss Ingram as his misguided attempt to show Jane how much better she is (though I also wonder if it’s right to justify every mistake of a deeply flawed character). And the subplot not only fit neatly into the original sequence of events, but seemed like something that could have really happened in “Jane Eyre.” This was a great book in a lot of ways; I just wanted a tighter story and a deeper exploration of Jane and Rochester’s relationship.