Patricia Park in conversation with Margot Livesey

An alert from Cambridge, MA for today, April 10:

New Voices in Fiction
Patricia Park reads from Re Jane: A Novel in conversation with Margot Livesey

Co-sponsored by GrubStreet
This event includes a book signing
Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

This event is free; no tickets are required.

Harvard Book Store and GrubStreet welcome essayist and former Fulbright Scholar Patricia Park for a discussion of Park's novel Re Jane, a fresh, contemporary retelling of the classic Jane Eyre. Patricia will be joined in conversation by Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a modern take on Jane Eyre set in 1960s Scotland.
For Jane Re, half-Korean, half-American orphan, Flushing, Queens, is the place she’s been trying to escape from her whole life. Sardonic yet vulnerable, Jane toils, unappreciated, in her strict uncle’s grocery store and politely observes the traditional principle of nunchi (a combination of good manners, hierarchy, and obligation). Desperate for a new life, she’s thrilled to become the au pair for the Mazer-Farleys, two Brooklyn English professors and their adopted Chinese daughter. Inducted into the world of organic food co-ops, and nineteenth–century novels, Jane is the recipient of Beth Mazer’s feminist lectures and Ed Farley’s very male attention. But when a family death interrupts Jane and Ed’s blossoming affair, she flies off to Seoul, leaving New York far behind.
Reconnecting with family, and struggling to learn the ways of modern-day Korea, Jane begins to wonder if Ed Farley is really the man for her. Jane returns to Queens, where she must find a balance between two cultures and accept who she really is. Re Jane is a bright, comic story of falling in love, finding strength, and living not just out of obligation to others, but for one’s self.