Mr. Rochester

I love retellings of familiar stories. I like to see what new insights emerge when a story I know well is told from a different perspective, or moved into a different culture or time period. So, I was really looking forward to this retelling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of Mr. Rochester. My conclusion: it's a perfectly good book, well researched and written, competently fleshing out what we know of Mr. Rochester from the original novel, but it doesn't offer much, if any, new insight to the story.

As a side note, I thought the author's treatment of slavery in Jamaica was too detached. Mr. Rochester comments from time to time that being around slavery hardened him to the horror of it, but the reader doesn't experience that in the story. Maybe that would have been hard to write, but since slavery was omnipresent in Jamaica at the time, it didn't feel honest to have slavery in soft focus for that part of the book.

Bottom line: just reread Jane Eyre or get this book from the library. No need to buy a copy.