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A Novel
by Marian Yee
Through time, space, and the transcendence of maternal love, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is reimagined in the parallel lives of one soul searching for meaning, connection, and a place to belong.
Jane Eyre is a missionary's wife.
A bookseller in Vietnam.
A time traveler.
A hero in a modern gothic tale.
What if Jane's story didn't end with her marriage to Edward Rochester? What if she never married him at all?
In one lifetime, Jane travels to India and Burma as Mrs. St. John Rivers. In another, she's Trang, a young woman selling books in Vietnam, vying for the love of the local priest. Yet another picks up where Brontë left her, now grieving the loss of her child and crossing time and space to find him. And finally, a young Vietnamese-American man searching for himself in Boston, a tutor whose relationship with a veteran feels strangely, achingly familiar…
Each thread tells Jane's story in sweeping, heartbreaking shades of loss, vulnerability, yearning, and the fierce love of mother and child that withstands time and space. While she may long for something more out of a life she didn't get to choose, she can still decide what to make of it.
"4 Janes is an inventive and heartbreaking epic that reimagines the iconic character of Jane Eyre, exploring how one enduring figure transcends space and time. Spanning continents and eras, Marian Yee reveals how belief, love, and resilience echo through the ages. A tribute to the transformative power of reading." ―Michelle Min Sterling, New York Times bestselling author of Camp Zero
"Four very different Jane Eyres lead parallel lives in Marian Yee's 4 Janes, an ideal read for the Brontë fan longing for more. Exquisitely written and populated with captivating and surprising characters―from the madwoman in the attic to Ho Chi Minh―this genre-bending novel illuminates the tender soul at the heart of one of literature's most beloved classics. Vivid, modern, and inventive." ―Caroline Woods, author of The Mesmerist, The Lunar Housewife, and Fräulein M.
This information about 4 Janes was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Marian Yee is a writer, scholar, and award-winning teacher. As a professor in the Liberal Arts and Sciences Department at Berklee College of Music, she teaches writing, literature, and visual studies to performing arts students. Marian's published writings include poems, reviews, and scholarly articles. 4 Janes is her debut novel, inspired by a trip to Vietnam in 1995, where she met a street seller who was reading an abridged copy of Jane Eyre to learn English. The author lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with her family.
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