I just read Jane Eyre and was advised to follow it up with this book. Generally, people writing about other author’s characters leaves me unsettled (unauthorized! Not your creation!) but Wide Sargasso Sea is a perfect companion novel.

Some of Rhys’s concise writing style threw me. I had to reread parts because I couldn’t tell who was talking or narrating the story. She writes in dialect and that was difficult at the beginning.

The whole thing was very dreamlike—or maybe nightmarish is a better adjective.

I didn’t enjoy this book all that much. Not because it’s not well written or because it’s not interesting, but because it imagines and tells the story of a character from one of my favorite novels, Jane Eyre. But if you’re not madly in love with Jane Eyre, you’ll probably enjoy this book. Or even if you are, maybe you’ll enjoy it anyway!

in honor of my trip to jamaica, this is my plane and beach book this week.