(1.5 stars) Oh man, I really wanted to like this book: not only am I half-Asian like the book's protagonist, but I'm also a pretty big fan of Jane Eyre. Patricia Park does a wonderful job of portraying the awkward cultural space inhabited by many people of mixed race. Unfortunately, too many things in this book just didn't work for me. (Including the writing... the prose itself was riddled with cliches and awkward similes.) 
 Missing fundamental parts of Jane Eyre's personality 
 One of the things I love about Jane Eyre is her strong sense of right and wrong, which is a fundamental part of her personality. Now, I'm perfectly aware that Eyre's Victorian sensibilities don't translate to early 21st-century New York - but the actions of her Korean-American counterpart make it impossible for me to see the two characters as related. 
 Jane Eyre fell in love with an employer she believed to be a bachelor. When she discovered that he was, in fact, married, she miserably removed herself from the situation. 
 In contrast: Jane Re intentionally sleeps with a married man, betraying his well-meaning wife and destabilizing the life of his young daughter. She knows that this is a terrible, destructive thing to do, but she does it anyway. It's pretty hard for me to stay sympathetic to Jane after this kind of betrayal. 
 References don't feel "earned" 
 Too often, it felt like something had been placed in the story solely as a nod to Bronte, rather than flowing naturally from the plot. Ed Farley (Rochester's NYC alter-ego) was briefly grumpy with Jane Re, but he got over it pretty fast. Their interaction was nowhere as turbulent or fascinating as Rochester's slow courtship of Jane Eyre - and, in fact, Ed Farley's brief grumpiness didn't seem to have much of an effect on their romance at all. 
 A lot of references were too on-the-nose for my tastes. Jane's father turns out to be a man named Currer Bell. The Bertha Mason stand-in wrote a dissertation called "Who Let the Madwoman Out?: Bertha Mason and Nineteenth-Century (Mis)Constructs of Female Hysteria, Madness, and the Vagina Dentata". I mean.... it's really too on-the-nose. 
 Also, the narrator peppers her thoughts with "Reader" this and "Dear Reader," that: obvious references to famous Brontean lines like "Reader, I married him." This kind of aside makes sense in Jane Eyre since it was written as a pretend autobiography, but Re Jane makes no such claim - so what reader is Jane Re supposed to be talking to? Is she writing down her experiences as a memoir, or just silently reminiscing to herself? It's never, ever explained. 
 While it's fun to be able to pick out all the references to Jane Eyre, this novel leans too heavily on its predecessor to stand on its own.